Referring to God in Feminine Terms

[aborodki]

I visited one of those catholic women priests websites. I was bored and waiting for a friend to come pick me up. During their prayers, they refer to God in feminine terms. I understand that God is genderless but Jesus did refer to God in the Masculine " Father." Is it therefore incorrect to refer to God in feminine terms?

 

[puzzleannie]

I visited one of those catholic women priests websites. I was bored and waiting for a friend to come pick me up. During their prayers, they refer to God in feminine terms. I understand that God is genderless but Jesus did refer to God in the Masculine " Father." Is it therefore incorrect to refer to God in feminine terms?

Yes it is heretical for instance to call God Our Mother, since God revealed Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. it is not heretical to refer to God in terms scripture uses that are grammatically feminine in gender (such as Holy Wisdom) but it is both an error in theology and an error in grammar to insist that because the biblical language assigns gender to certain nouns, therefore God is a woman.

 

[Eucharisted]

Yes, it’s incorrect. He, His are nutural pronouns for God. We don’t use the it and its pronouns because God is not a thing but a Trinity: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Father, Son are the names God has revealed because He wants to teach us about Himself. We use the pronouns His, He for the three Persons because they are not things but Divine Hypostasis.

 

[DOShea]

Why would you think anything they do is valid?

From their website:

Roman Catholic Womenpriests reject the penalty of excommunication issued by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith on May 29, 2008 stating that the “women priests and the bishops who ordain them would be excommunicated latae sententiae.”

They are like New Agers in liturgical garb. It’s all about me. We talk God and serve God so long as it suits us and His plan fits our plans. Teaching and Tradition are fine as long as we don’t need to actually apply it to us. That is the line of thinking of people who engage in that kind of activity.

 

[Mark77]

There is no such thing as an ordained “catholic woman priest”, that’s like saying a male just gave birth!

in 1994 Pope Jon Paul II, in His APOSTOLIC LETTER

ORDINATIO SACERDOTALIS

TO THE BISHOPS
OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
ON RESERVING PRIESTLY ORDINATION
TO MEN ALONE

"Venerable Brothers in the Episcopate,

1. Priestly ordination, which hands on the office entrusted by Christ to his Apostles of teaching, sanctifying and governing the faithful, has in the Catholic Church from the beginning always been reserved to men alone. This tradition has also been faithfully maintained by the Oriental Churches."

read here (vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_22051994_ordinatio-sacerdotalis_en.html)

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, Ora Pro Nobis Peccatoribus!

mark

 

[shoewindow3000]

If God wanted you to be a priest, you would have born male.

If you are born female, it is obviously not God’s will for you to be a priest.

 

[pnewton]

There is no such thing as an ordained “catholic woman priest”, that’s like saying a male just gave birth!

Or the Eucharist being made from chicken. Women are invalid matter for the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

 

[Genesius]

I was recently watching EWTN and a certain priest was preaching about this very subject of feminism creeping into the Church. I liked his comment. He said, “I’ve always wanted to bear children, but I can’t…women can’t be priests…get over it!”

To put his statement in context, he was describing how God designed men & women differently with different, but just as important, roles.

 

[Peter_Dawson]

I visited one of those catholic women priests websites. I was bored and waiting for a friend to come pick me up. During their prayers, they refer to God in feminine terms. I understand that God is genderless but Jesus did refer to God in the Masculine " Father." Is it therefore incorrect to refer to God in feminine terms?

This is an important issue, and must not be understood in the slightest, I think.

When God created the world, He filled our world with “pictures” of Himself and of His theology, to make our world a “God teaching machine.” The “pictures” are the same as the types, or symbols, in the Bible.

One of the most important pictures is gender. Masculinity represents God’s perfect justice. Femininity representrs God’s love.

When gender is combined into the nuclear family, we have a picture of the Trinity!

The “man of the house” represents God the Father with God’s justice. The “lady of the house” represents beloved God the Son Who, by His enormous sacrifice, embodied an act of love. The “fruit of the relationship,” the children, represent the love proceeding out of the relationship between the Father and the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

Frequently, commentators are tempted to abandon “masculine by preference” in the case of the Holy Spirit, Who strikes them as somehow “feminine.” This is wrong. I think that the Holy Spirit is not strongly characterized either way in Scripture because God had no point to make connected to gender in His portrayals of the Third Person of the Trinity to Mankind, so that commentators, anxious to “please the ladies,” sometimes regard the Holy Spirit as a “safe landing place” for feminism.

Oddly, the “safe landing place” for feminist typology in The Faith is the SECOND Person of the Trinity, Christ! This, however, must be done carefully – not in some wild “let’s-twist-the-Faith-to-fit-feminism” way.

In Bible typology, the Man Type symbolizes “God,” “representative of God,” or “empowered by God,” always to represent God’s justice.

In Bible typology, the Woman Type represents us humans! Why? Because we are beloved of God, I think. So, since Christ came to Earth as a human, ON OCCASION THE BIBLE SYMBOLIZES CHRIST WITH A WOMAN!

Many conservatives here will be repulsed by that idea, but it is true.

And feminists will like that idea, but they will wildly exaggerate the concept, and so twist the Faith to fit feminism, and commit a sin, to that extent.

Where does the Bible portray Christ with a woman?

One place is is the story of the Levite of Ephraim, in the Book of Judges. Christ is symbolized by the CONCUBINE in the story, of all things!

 

[DOShea]

Thing is, these are all man-made, word constructs that convey ideas or qualities. One can take the quality “nuturing,” for example, and easily associate that with a mother’s love for a child. Then, in analogy, liken it to Christ’s patience and teaching of His disciples who all so frequently didn’t seem to understand what He was talking about.

But from there, to make the leap into Christ was feminine, is a second pole-vault that is totally arbitrary AND not necessary. Nothing compels us to make a mandatory association with nurturing and feminine, as clearly fathers nurture their children too, though perhaps in different ways than mothers do.

You can compare this to some languages that use masculine and feminine nouns, such as the French language. A pen is masculine; a pencil feminine. Why? Is there something special about pencils peculiar only to femininity or mothers? No, men can use a pencil too. Its just an arbitrary placement. Likewise with a characteristic such as nurturing.

 

[Genesius]

I once heard a priest preaching from the book of Luke about something totally unrelated to feminism, but somehow felt the need to preface it by saying, “Some scholars believe Luke may have been a woman.”

My first thought was, “What on earth does that have to do with the homily?” Secondly, I thought, “Who are these so-called ‘scholars’?”. Thirdly, drawing on my knowledge from Bible College I knew that Luke could not have been a woman. For one thing, Luke has always been a masculine name. Secondly, Luke was a physician and in Luke’s culture women would never have held such a prestigious position as a doctor.