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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)		  
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