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Guest
We all know that Christ calls God “Abba” – which is an informal way to address “Father” – Papa, Daddy, etc. It was revolutionary in its time, and still is, for it produces a relation between us and God that was almost anathema in the Hellenistic worldview that surrounded 1st century Jews.
The Greeks who were among the first Gentile converts to Christianity had a long and proud tradition of philosophy, with discussion of three major philosophers who wrote about 400 years before Christ: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These two philosophers still define much western and Islamic philosophy. Greek philosophical concepts appear in the Bible (most notaby in the beginning of the Gospel of John, featuring Christ as Logos – Greek for “word”).
It’s important that we understand how first and second century Christians interpreted the Bible, given their lenses of Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy. Furthermore, it’s important that we evaluate how their understanding of the world may have introduced culture-specific concepts into the universal message of Christianity.
The two philosophers, Plato (a student of Socrates and the only source for his teacher’s ideas) and Aristotle constitute starkly different ways of understanding the world.
Plato tended to view the world based as deriving from some conceptual “form” or ideal on which everything is based. So several triangles are all represented by the form “triangle.” Knowledge was based on contemplation of the forms, or representations of the forms. To Plato, the form was higher and better than anything in the world, unconditional on anything worldly. Plato viewed God as the “unmoved mover,” the perfect, undifferentiated source of all things – emotionless, changeless, and distant from the world.
Aristotle, on the other hand, also considered conceptual forms, but also was concerned with how those forms were instantiated in the substance of the world. For Aristotle, knowledge came not from generalizing things, but from studying particular things. Through study and categorization of the world, knowledge of their “higher” essences could be gained.
The ancient Greeks viewed the male form as higher than the female, playing on Plato’s notion that things closer to their ideal form were superior. In terms of reproduction, the ancient Greeks thought of female reproductive organs as diminished versions of their male counterparts, so they referred to women’s testes.
Aristotle, with his concern over how the ideal forms were instantiated into the substance of the world, thought that in reproduction, the male contributed the form of humanity, while the female contributed only the brute matter of which we’re made.
It’s in these views of reproduction that we should look at the infancy narratives in the Bible, in both Luke and Matthew. When Mary (or Joseph) heard that Mary was to bear a son and call him Jesus, the ancient world would have had no problem with this idea. Following on Aristotle, Mary contributed the substance of Jesus’ physical body, while God contributed his form. This made the notion of the Virgin Birth much easier to comprehend.
Throughout much of Christian history, these views of human reproductive biology didn’t advance much. We see medieval imagery of sperm that contain whole, tiny people. In that view of human reproduction, men contributed everything essential about a person. Women just “fed and watered” the growing child. Here’s an image of “preformed” humans inside sperm:
http://www.badreputation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Preformation.gif
In all of these worldviews, women were “lesser” players in human reproduction. Men contributed the most important thing – in ancient Greek terms, the form of a person, or in medieval descriptions, a fully-formed human being, and women were the receptacles of this wonderment, who then just had the “base” task of caring for the baby’s physical development.
But we know this is wrong. Men and women both contribute DNA at the moment of conception, and then it’s the mother’s body that works with the child’s in bringing the child to birth.
What does this tell us about the Incarnation?
First, the Virgin Birth required more than God giving “form” to Jesus in the substance provided by Mary. God had to provide a fertilized conceptus: both sperm and egg.
In this regard, though Christ called God “abba,” and we call God “Father,” we should not overlook the fact that God was both father and mother to Jesus, though Mary shared in that motherhood intimately with God.
The Greeks who were among the first Gentile converts to Christianity had a long and proud tradition of philosophy, with discussion of three major philosophers who wrote about 400 years before Christ: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These two philosophers still define much western and Islamic philosophy. Greek philosophical concepts appear in the Bible (most notaby in the beginning of the Gospel of John, featuring Christ as Logos – Greek for “word”).
It’s important that we understand how first and second century Christians interpreted the Bible, given their lenses of Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy. Furthermore, it’s important that we evaluate how their understanding of the world may have introduced culture-specific concepts into the universal message of Christianity.
The two philosophers, Plato (a student of Socrates and the only source for his teacher’s ideas) and Aristotle constitute starkly different ways of understanding the world.
Plato tended to view the world based as deriving from some conceptual “form” or ideal on which everything is based. So several triangles are all represented by the form “triangle.” Knowledge was based on contemplation of the forms, or representations of the forms. To Plato, the form was higher and better than anything in the world, unconditional on anything worldly. Plato viewed God as the “unmoved mover,” the perfect, undifferentiated source of all things – emotionless, changeless, and distant from the world.
Aristotle, on the other hand, also considered conceptual forms, but also was concerned with how those forms were instantiated in the substance of the world. For Aristotle, knowledge came not from generalizing things, but from studying particular things. Through study and categorization of the world, knowledge of their “higher” essences could be gained.
The ancient Greeks viewed the male form as higher than the female, playing on Plato’s notion that things closer to their ideal form were superior. In terms of reproduction, the ancient Greeks thought of female reproductive organs as diminished versions of their male counterparts, so they referred to women’s testes.
Aristotle, with his concern over how the ideal forms were instantiated into the substance of the world, thought that in reproduction, the male contributed the form of humanity, while the female contributed only the brute matter of which we’re made.
It’s in these views of reproduction that we should look at the infancy narratives in the Bible, in both Luke and Matthew. When Mary (or Joseph) heard that Mary was to bear a son and call him Jesus, the ancient world would have had no problem with this idea. Following on Aristotle, Mary contributed the substance of Jesus’ physical body, while God contributed his form. This made the notion of the Virgin Birth much easier to comprehend.
Throughout much of Christian history, these views of human reproductive biology didn’t advance much. We see medieval imagery of sperm that contain whole, tiny people. In that view of human reproduction, men contributed everything essential about a person. Women just “fed and watered” the growing child. Here’s an image of “preformed” humans inside sperm:
http://www.badreputation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Preformation.gif
In all of these worldviews, women were “lesser” players in human reproduction. Men contributed the most important thing – in ancient Greek terms, the form of a person, or in medieval descriptions, a fully-formed human being, and women were the receptacles of this wonderment, who then just had the “base” task of caring for the baby’s physical development.
But we know this is wrong. Men and women both contribute DNA at the moment of conception, and then it’s the mother’s body that works with the child’s in bringing the child to birth.
What does this tell us about the Incarnation?
First, the Virgin Birth required more than God giving “form” to Jesus in the substance provided by Mary. God had to provide a fertilized conceptus: both sperm and egg.
In this regard, though Christ called God “abba,” and we call God “Father,” we should not overlook the fact that God was both father and mother to Jesus, though Mary shared in that motherhood intimately with God.