Children of a Better God
A Reply to “Is God Masculine?”
by S. M. Hutchens
Alan Padgett may be thanked for candor in his attack on the “traditionalist” Christianity shared against him and his authorities by the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox editors of Touchstone. He is not ashamed to make it clear his opinions are based on modern realizations about the inner nature of the faith, things not fully known or appreciated in the past, and against which those who fail to change their antiquated patriarchalist views may be accused of the unorthodoxy of Traditionalism. Thus he enlists the saints, angels, and even some of the doctors of the Church in his cause, for no right-thinking believer will mistake the traditions of humans for the doctrine of God, understood, thanks primarily to the efforts of a great many scholarly persons, more perfectly now than in times past. His frankness extends to his remarks about just what is wrong with the kind of Christianity against which he stands, but it is just there that those who may not be altogether sure of his materially advanced orthodoxy will find some points that give them pause.
Egalitarian Difficulties with Scripture
Padgett and those who share his opinions have profound difficulties with the Bible—not with passages that show men and women to be equal, of course, but in those that demonstrate an unfortunate tendency toward patriarchalism. These, by enlightened reckoning, are not really Holy Scripture, for they do not accord with the true message of the Bible, a message that can be divined only with some difficulty, but has been so-divined by a great many learned people skilled in such divinations. Padgett puts it this way, and italicizes lest we miss his point: “In my own research and publication on this issue, I have found again and again that patriarchy in the Bible is a cultural assumption of the authors, not a doctrine taught by the Scriptures. It is there in the Bible, certainly. But it is not what the Bible teaches as religious or moral truth.”
He goes on to find an example of patriarchalist misunderstanding in my view of the use of “head” in 1 Corinthians 11. To be sure, he concludes, Paul does use a good bit of male-oriented language, given his patriarchal education and culture, but while this is one of many similar instances of possible misprision, the actual teaching of this “difficult” passage is not patriarchal at all. By this he means that in the many places the Bible seems to advance patriarchy, it doesn’t really, while in the many places it treats men and women as equal, it really does. “The Bible certainly assumes patriarchy,” Padgett says, “and often puts things in a male-oriented way. But nowhere does the Bible teach the ‘male principle’ of ‘divine order’” to which those of us who don’t find this and similar passages particularly difficult hold.
Here one sighs and wonders just how far he need go on in the demonstration. Do we need to belabor the point that Padgett and his allies are using Jefferson’s razor—an interpretive principle that un-scriptures anything unfriendly to their convictions? What opposes these beliefs, they propose, is not really Scripture, it’s just “in the Bible” as a kind of cultural artifact of its writers, who can’t really be blamed for saying things in the wrong way, since they hadn’t our advantages. Wherever these deviations appear, a way must be found around them. Passages that appear to endorse patriarchalism actually oppose it in ways that can be explained by subtle minds, but only to those who are clever enough to follow them and bold enough to deny what is obvious to the simple. We who know better, they are telling us, can help these old authors along, fixing up their writing and making it more presentable to ears better attuned to truth than those of the Apostle Paul. It is painful to hear people who think this way accusing us of unorthodoxy. It is more painful still thinking of how many are following them.
Difficulties with Reason
Padgett demands a full and catholic definition of heresy, but one cannot fail to notice that unless he is a Catholic himself, his understanding of what can and cannot be called a heresy effectively insulates egalitarians from conviction on the charge, no matter how erroneous or divisive their teaching. What is the likelihood that what Protestants could consider an ecumenical council might be convened to condemn any of their doctrines? And if he is a Catholic, how does he stand with respect to papal and magisterial teaching on egalitarian issues? If his definition holds, identifying someone as a heretic, whatever he teaches and whatever its effect on the Church, is impossible among Protestants for any foreseeable future. If he is a Catholic, he is teaching what Catholic authority identifies as error, so cannot credibly claim protection from the body of doctrine to which he goes for support. (If he is Orthodox, he may expect to meet with a fatal accident.) I will hold to my definition: In the beginning and the end, heresy refers to false teaching and its divisive effect on the Church. That is its essential meaning, both before and after official condemnation. For a teaching to be identified as a heresy and condemned as such, it must first be a heresy, and someone must allege that it is so.
Egalitarians typically claim for themselves the support of apophatic theology, saying that God, because he is ineffable Spirit, is above all categories properly applied to creation, like “father,” so that when terminology like this is used, it is metaphorical, describing what God is like, but not what God in God’s fundamental being—which is beyond all of this—is. They deduce from this that if God is like a father, if he demonstrates masculine qualities, he is also, because he demonstrates feminine ones, like a mother, so that if we use masculine terms for God, they, being no more than metaphors, are just as good as other serviceable metaphors—therefore God is as much Mother as Father—that the masculine and the feminine, so far as we may say they exist in God, are equal co-principles, as reflected in the created co-principality of male and female, mother and father. This shell-game catechism is repeated in many forms.
We observe, however, that one can’t have his cake and eat it too. One cannot say that God is beyond the categories of creation and then use this to make deductions about how we are to speak of him when we use these categories. If he is beyond them, he is beyond them, and we cannot move from there to the next step in their logic, that the categories of creation are metaphorical, for this is saying something about the relation of that which is effable to that which is not. If something is beyond knowing, it is also beyond comparing to what can be known. Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” would seem to apply. But silent the egalitarians are not, for it is just here they advance their notion that there is a “not” (for that is part of what is meant by “metaphor”) that stands between the language of revelation and its divine referents. God, while he is “Father,” is not Father, strictly speaking, and because “Father,” being metaphor, is neither exclusive nor prescriptive, God, who is also like a mother, may also be called by that name.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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