Grandfather Helder,
I recently went to visit my grandchildren and two sons and their wives, who both, after my divorce, became involved in Christian fundamentalist churches. At one time, they professed to be Berean Baptists, and now I think they might be Southern Baptists. They both are ‘very concerned’ about my salvation. After all, I am ordained in a liturgical church. I cannot affirm the 66 ‘books’ that make up the protestant bible are literally the words of their god, cannot endorse their notion that their good god, to salve his personal affront, had his only son tortured to death, and I am Loved by the Spirit, not saved or born again. They make it so difficult for me to be with them, so I see them seldom.

After dinner, sitting around the table, again they guide the conversation into a theological question and answer, looking for an angle that might produce my salvation. It’s okay, I can take care of myself, but the thing most disturbing to me was that as soon as their wives had finished clearing the table, after a wonderful meal they had served us and had served the decaf, when the talk turned to theology, they oddly, left the table to sit on a couch in an adjacent room and made no contribution to the conversation. They listened but were silent. And then it struck me. I was witnessing patriarchy and complementarianism in all its glory. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas would be proud (women are ‘misbegotten males’). The wives, whose services were no longer needed, were unwelcome in a theological conversation! I was stunned, a little speechless, offended, and what I felt was rage. I didn’t want to make a scene; perhaps I should have, but it would have changed nothing. Fortunately for me, I was staying in a hotel and had an early plane to catch, so I excused myself early. I see them so seldom, and that makes me even more outraged!

• • •

Passerby,
Your story makes me angry just listening to it. Let’s be still, wait here in silence for a while as She sorts us out, and listen to what She might offer before we move on…
….now, with your permission, I, of course (with a twinkle in his eye), have much to say about this.

He shall rule over you.

The concept of rule over, power over, or subjugation of, while expected and normal in first- century Palestine, is completely foreign to the teaching of Jesus. And, the idea of overpowering the weaker so that you can get what you might not otherwise be entitled to is—among other things, rape—repugnant to the teaching of Jesus. He taught us an upside-down kingdom. He said:

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his [entire] life as a ransom for many.”

Matthew 20:25-28

According to Jesus, the servant and the enslaved person—that’s you and me—are to exercise power over no one, and yet, the religion that men—and I mean men—invented in the name of the one who taught us to Love one another as he loves us, men instead founded in hierarchy—rule from the top down—and patriarchy—rule by men; both of which are crimes by men against women.

As you have heard me say many times, “There are some things that can only be fixed by returning to the place where we took the original wrong turn and begin again; this time, taking the correct path. This is one of those times. The beginning is a great place to start if we want to right a wrong.

“So [They] created [humans] in [Her] own image, in the image of God [She] created [them] male and female [She] created them. (italics mine, to make personal pronouns consistent with the meaning of the text)”

Genesis 1:27 [emphasis mine.]

You have noticed multiple times in the above text from Genesis that I found it helpful to influence the text to emphasize the character of the Creator Spirit over the spirit of patriarchy in which it was written. (humans), a noun, not, [man], a personal pronoun, which confers the male gender. This reading has had grave historical consequences. There has even been the assumption that only men, not women, are created in the image of God. (God’s), a personal pronoun, not [his], a pronoun which confers the male gender. God is Spirit and has no need of gender. (God), a personal pronoun, not [he], a pronoun which confers the male gender. (them), a pronoun that does not confer the male gender. I might have chosen to use the Hebrew word, Adam, from the original text, which confers no gender, but which simply means, humans or people. And again, (God), a personal pronoun, not [he], a pronoun which confers the male gender.

The above text lets us know it takes both Females and Males, in equal measure, for humans to be ‘in the image’ of God. God is Male and female apparently, and yet, as Jesus taught us, “God is Spirit (John 4:24),” and Spirit has no anatomy except what humans imagine for Her. What do we hear when we read, “male and female God created them,” In God’s image?

• • •

Sacred Feminine and Holy Masculine

Let’s lay aside the biological words, male and female for a moment—which are the vessels for, but are not Her image—and instead, employ the more helpful words of ‘sacred feminine’ and ‘holy masculine’ I am indebted to Mirabai Starr, who has proposed the language of Sacred Feminine and Holy Masculine, which I like very much. when speaking of the spiritual image of God in which all humans are created, and in and with whom, She is pleased to dwell. Biology is obviously not the context of the Great Spirit. She is Spirit only. So…only spiritual metaphors can come close to describing Her image and likeness, as Jesus pointed out. Biology has no role in our understanding of Spirit.

It is significant to note that She created them sacred feminine and holy masculine in Her image. This tells us they are not identical. She would not have needed to reveal Herself as both if they were the same, yet assigning them attributes and roles is unfruitful. When we focus on differences—or sameness—we lose track of Her purpose in making us the revelation of Her self in creation.

We are Complementary and different, compatible and diverse. Each is incomplete alone, and only together are we in Her image and thereby capable of fulfilling the human vocation of tending, keeping, guarding, and protecting all the work of Her hands so that each kind is allowed to fulfill its created purpose. We are completely equal. We are both unique.

(Passerby, an aside. Feminism was wildly misguided in selling our culture on the notion of homogeneity of the sexes, and we have suffered for buying into it. The Sacred Feminine and the Holy Masculine are unique, and only together, side by side, are they Her image and likeness. Of course, in fairness, a secular movement has no reason to inherit its purpose from spiritual critique and dialogue. Simple biology suits their purposes.)

• • •

The debasement of women by men is not a recent issue. The foundations were laid long ago.

There is, in Paul and Deutero-Pauline The letters in question—2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus—are often called the Deutero-Pauline letters, meaning secondary letters, or pseudo-Pauline, meaning false letters of Paul.texts, the notion that women are to be submissive to men as the “Order of Creation” (1 Cor 11:2-16) because men were created in the image of god while women were created in the image of man. Christians are informed by both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas that women are ‘misbegotten males.’ John Marston John Marston (baptised 7 October 1576 – 25 June 1634) was an English playwright, poet and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods.wrote women are “made of blood without souls.” Good ol’ St Augustine wrote that “women (taking his cue from Paul), unlike men, are not made in the image and likeness of God.

—gleaned from Matthew Fox, Original Blessing

Apparently, Augustine, Aquinas, and Aristotle believed that Adam alone completed the image of God except for making babies and someone to make refreshments. Their foolishness is evidenced in our time by the complementarianism of Christian literalists/ fundamentalists. As for Paul, he was a Jew and brought his patriarchal heresy with him. Both Jewish and Islamic traditions endorse the same.

So, I propose we go back to the beginning.

• • •

A Genesis Problem

I gleaned the following quotes from O’Murchu, Ecological Spirituality.

“The God (Elohim) who dominates the first chapter of the Bible has disappeared from the human scene by the end of Genesis. Story after story reveals a much more disturbing God (Yahweh)…The benevolent Creator becomes a fearful destroyer…By the end of the text, almost every one of the expectations we were encouraged to form in chapter one have been knocked down.”

—Armstrong 1996, 13

“The Hebrew Bible contains 1,000 verses where God’s own violent actions of punishment are described, 100 passages where Yahweh expressly commands others to kill people, and several stories where God kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason. Violence is easily the most often mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible.”

—Raymund Schwager 1987, 60

For Christians, if I say beginning, they hear the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, so let us begin with Genesis 1:1-2:3 In terms of recent liberal biblical scholarship, the ‘P’ version, or priestly version, of the creation narrative. Written in the 500’s BCE, roughly the same time as the exile, 586-539 BCE, as a polemic for the importance of the Sabbath. For a complete discussion, ‘Reading the Bible Again for the First Time’, Marcus Borg.. This text is the first of other creation narratives in the Christian Canon of sacred scriptures, and it does not reference male patriarchy. There is no hint of any preference for males over females or the Holy Masculine over the Sacred Feminine by the Sacred Spirit. In verse 31, the text says, “And God saw everything that [She] had made, and behold, it was very good.”

So far, so good. The human kind is in the exact image of the Creator Spirit that She determined is best expressed as Sacred Feminine and Holy Masculine. Together, both, in equal measure, and at the same time. Remove or repress one, and we no longer have Her image.

• • •

If the “God of your understanding” ‘The Big Book’ Alcoholics Anonymous., like the ‘P’ story, is loving, forgiving, understanding, and sounds in words and looks in deeds a lot like the Jesus ‘If you have seen me, you have seen the Father’, Jesus. John 14:6-11.
of the sermon on the mount Matthew 5, 6 and 7., this ‘P’ creation narrative will appeal to you. It will sound like a love letter from the Sacred Spirit to you. You will feel loved and safely tucked into the Christ in a benevolent cosmos.

• • •

The second creation narrative, Genesis 2:4-3:24, commonly known as the ‘J,’ or Yahwist Because the writer uses Yahweh as the name of Godstory (since YHWH is the name of God in this mythology), was written in the 900s BCE and predates the ‘P’ narrative by some 400 years. The differences between these two narratives, especially regarding the Sacred Feminine (female in the text) and the Holy Masculine (male in the text), are striking.

Paul uses this unfortunate mythology to reinforce his opinion that women are required to be subject to men since ‘Adam’ was created first; it is a kind of rule of firsts. The endings of these two narratives are wildly different. ‘P’ ends with a harmonious cosmology:

“And [the Spirit] saw everything that [She] had made, and behold, it was very good.”

• • •

‘J’ ends in disaster. The human kind are banned from the presence of ‘god’, and from the relationship with the Spirit for which they were created, and measures are taken by ‘god’ to see that they cannot simply ask for forgiveness and return, and it is all the fault of the female.

As my friend Adam, a former seminarian and student, pointed out, “Our salvation, meaning getting the forgiveness of God, is certainly overly complicated. It seems that if God had a problem with humanity, She would have simply forgiven them, just like Jesus taught Matthew 18:22us how we were to treat one another.

If the ‘god’ of your understanding is retributive, not restorative, angry, not patient, just, but not merciful, and righteous, but not compassionate, the ‘J’ creation narrative is for you. But, the god it portrays is not the Father of Jesus and is likely little more than a projection of your false self. And like your false self, he [sic] exists only in your mind.

• • •

While it does not bear total responsibility for the historic abuse cross-culturally, the Jawist narrative did provide patriarchal Christian and Jewish theologizers with the evidence they needed to reinforce the practice of the subjugation (including complementarianism) of the female human (‘our original sin’) by the male human. Had patriarchy not found the ‘P’ creation narrative lacking in the grist that promised to fulfill their lust for money, sex, and power and had instead, over the centuries, joyfully received and embraced it with the graces of humility, equality and equity, which the Spirit intended, humanity could perhaps have stayed a little longer in the Eden relationship for which we were created.