Origins of Christian God- Through Cultural, Historical, Anthropology lens

[zeek]

In the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1:27 says "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." If God doesn't have a feminine side, how could the female be created in God's image?

[SerenityLives]

Originally Posted by zeek

In the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1:27 says "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." If God doesn't have a feminine side, how could the female be created in God's image?

This is true. God said let “Us”. Can the Us encompass another godess or goddesses? or even female angels/companions, God’s female council? Or God is without gender

[zeek]

Originally Posted by SerenityLives

This is true. God said let “Us”. Can the Us encompass another godess or goddesses? or even female angels/companions, God’s female council? Or God is without gender

Sandra M Schneiders, professor emerita in the Jesuit School of Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in "Women and the Word: the Gender of God in the New Testament and the Spirituality of Women" begins by pointing out that theology never assigned sex to God for the Bible says that God is pure spirit and spirit does not have sex. She quotes John 4:24 in this connection in which Jesus says to the Samaritan woman "God is Spirit and those who worship must worship in Spirit and Truth."

As for the language that denotes God as the Father and the Son, Schneiders notes that Gregory of Nyssa well represented the tradition when he affirmed that the terms Father and Son as applied to persons of the Trinity were not names of natures or essences but of relations and furthermore the terms are used metaphorically.

Our God image, Schneiders points out, is determined largely by our imagination and our imagination is shaped by the metaphors that are used to depict the nature of the God that Judaism and Christianity espouse. Because the church and purportedly the Bible used so many masculine metaphors with reference to God it produces a situation in which a woman who reads the Bible must see herself as an inferior version of humanity subject first to human men and ultimately to the infinite Divine male who established the patriarchal world organization. What is needed she says is "a therapy of the religious imagination."