Reader: How might you respond to a feminist critique of the incarnation that says that if God is endlessly incarnate in the person of Jesus then this means God is male? Is this inherently patriarchal?
Response: Who did Jesus get the flesh from? Part of the contemporary problem is in not recognizing the profound role of Mary in our redemption.
The only way for both sexes to be involved in the incarnation was for a woman to bear and give birth to a man.
That Jesus is an incarnate male is not enough and was never the point, the point is that Jesus took on the ONE HUMAN NATURE that all humans share in the good creation, male and female.
Jesus is the Son of God but Jesus is also the son of Mary. This mystery needs far greater contemplative attention for the Christian account of love to be credible.
It is not the maleness of Jesus that saves us but his bearing the one human nature all humans share, and he bears that nature because of Mary’s blessed yes to the trinitarian invitation that Mary participate with her son in the redemption of the cosmos.
Revelation 12’s wondrous account of the incarnation paints Mary very much into the eternal and cosmic picture of salvation. Why do we ignore its grand beauty?
People who make Christ’s maleness exclusive of female human nature—in the church, in the home, and in the world—do not understand that humanity is made in the image of God as male *and* female. We are never going this alone without each other.
Both sexes participate with God in the reconciliation of humanity by the flesh of Mary and by the flesh of Jesus, who in their unique persons by the Spirit overturn the alienation of Adam and Eve and of us all from the life of God, for his existence without end.
By the way, this is all addressed very early in Christian thought...in Irenaeus, for instance. My account here is not a response or reaction to contemporary feminism.
Christianity is in all of these beautiful senses feminist and has always been.
PS: This is not to say that all of the roles they play in and toward each other: daughter, mother, bride, sister, and son, brother, bridegroom, and so on, are not an example of sanctity to us in the ways we are also all of these things to each other.
Comments