Women and the Trinity

Women and the Trinity

For most of us, faith development is a process. We grow in wisdom and stature and favor with God. As a Christian woman I know that my consciousness about the feminist agenda has evolved in stages also.

First, I became aware of the generic language. Words like "mankind", "brotherhood", and the overused pronoun "he" was supposed to describe all of humanity. IT was clear that they contained a masculine bias. Little girls grew up hearing those words literally and scaling down their self-image. I decided that even if I was not personally offended by these terms, inclusive language was a matter of justice. Language both reflects the way we think and informs what we think. That was stage one in my feminist journey.

Secondly, I began to be concerned with the language in which we use to describe God. If Christians insist that God be without gender, why do we call God "he" at every turn? God is personal. The very meaning of incarnation informs us that the God whom we know in Jesus Christ cares about us and loves us like parents, our friends, and our special others. Yet I have never met a "person" who was neither male nor female. It is clear that the understanding of God as objective force or philosophic idea was not an aspect of Christian theology.

From all these thoughts I have come to think about God in the aspect of the Trinity. I am convinced, like many others before me, that Trinitarian theology captures some of the unique message of the gospel and expresses certain understanding of God that are consistent with women's experience.

On one level the Trinitarian formula for God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is totally unacceptable --an old man, a young man, and a dove. The words are redolent of hiera...

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...hrist came to heal, reconcile, and invite the world to enter freely and fully into the divine life." We are called to be faithful to the dynamic reality of the love of the triune God.

To sum up, Theology seeks one general word for the three, however. It cannot be Father or Son or Spirit, for these words name what is distinctive; there is only one of each. It also would not be right to say there are three essences for that would deliver to us more than one God. In the end it is legitimate to say that there are three person, provided that this be understood as mystery and not in any usual or known sense.

When it is asked three what, then the great poverty form which our language suffers becomes apparent. But the formula three persons was coined not in order to give a complete explanation by mean of it, but in order that we might be obliged to remain silent.