Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site cornell.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!houxz!vax135!cornell!gtaylor From: gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (Greg Taylor) Newsgroups: net.religion,net.women Subject: Re: Deific gender question Message-ID: <166@cornell.UUCP> Date: Wed, 8-Aug-84 10:13:13 EDT Article-I.D.: cornell.166 Posted: Wed Aug 8 10:13:13 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 9-Aug-84 03:46:06 EDT References: <254@siemens.UUCP> <957@pyuxn.UUCP> <921@pucc-h> Reply-To: gtaylor@gvax.UUCP (Greg Taylor) Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept. Lines: 53 The "feminine" image attributed to Jesus by Jeff is itself a quotation from the Psalms. I think that if we wish to seriously talk about Deific gender within the Christian tradition, we need to address two fairly dissimilar issues: Gender and language. English doesn't really have a gender neutral promoun that I know of. It seems that what little I remember from my Hebrew (linguistics, unfortunately), there is a "plural of respect"...that is, that certain honorific titles and references which involve powe or a relationship require the use of the plural (Oh my-I have the sinking feeling that I could be thinking of Javanese......), which is understood in the context of usage to *not* necessarily be gender specicific. Naturally, that's a bit of a problem for a language like English. The question might more accurately be put something like this: To what extent do Hebrew, Greek and Latin *allow* for the notion of "transcended gender" in the conventions of common speech. If that is a difficult notion to express in the conventions of regular discourse, then how would one go about hunting for times when an author tried to express such a notion? I would think that this would be a fairly difficult problem for even the most dedicatedly Deconstructive, let alone the average conservative scholar of the Torah, the Patristics, or the NT. Gender and Culture. Syntactics and Semantics embody a rather complex set of relationships: a usage of certain words may imply a substratum of relationships encoded in the conventions of speech (why, for example do we put certain words with certain other words....when all is quiet, we say that silence "reigns" rather than governs? But I digress.). Those assumptions and "threads" are, I think, also imbedded in the culture in which the phrases in question are uttered. The corrolary question then becomes: To what extent are gender related utterances cultural (although you'd never believe it, *some* Christians believe that that Christ was not an American, not a Republican, and not a Fundementalist), and how are they best understood? I am thinking in particular of a very interesting "biography" of Jesus written by Shusaku Endo, the eminent Japanese Novelist. Endo is a Catholic (in the tradition of Gabriel Marcel, Bernanos, and the other European Christian Existential tradition folk) who undertook a life of Christ in order to present Jesus to the Japanese in a non-western way. One of the major difficulties he felt he had to overcome was the difficulty of familial imagery in Japanese culture and language. His book presents God as a "mother" figure, since the Japanese image of the mother is more in keeping with what Endo feels to be the orthodox conception of God. It is, in my view, a strange and wonderful book in that it's the first real non-Western version of the Gender/Language/Culture problem that I've ever really encountered in such an explicit way. If you're at all interested in this question, you might want to check it out. I should cut this short, since our Bitnet link is acting funny. Bye now.... ________________________________________________________________________________ If you ask me, I may tell you gtaylor@cornell it's been this way for years Gregory Taylor I play my red guitar.... Theorynet (Theoryknot) ________________________________________________________________________________