THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A FEMININE HOLY SPIRIT

A major and rather instant result of perceiving the Holy Spirit’s femininity is the replacement of confusion with understanding. Once that connection is made, the Godhead’s attribute of Unity in the face of Trinity is no longer a logical inconsistency; the understanding itself immediately emerges with the depth of full intuition, so boldly as to evoke not only a sense of functional differentiation among the Members of the Godhead, but also to resolve the former paradox of unity in Trinity and to encourage the assignment of specific functions to each of them.

The Trinity, given the inclusion of femininity, at once is seen in a Family context. Viewing the Godhead in context of Family, the Family Entity is seen to reside above the three Members of the Trinity, representing the oneness of God in loving relationship, to which the individual Members are subordinate. In that setting, the Trinitarian Godhead represents the unity of Family, whereas the individual Members of the Godhead represent the three familiar functional roles of Father, Mother and Son.

In the context of function, the Father naturally represents the Divine Will in accordance with that assignment as given in Scripture, whereas the Holy Spirit responds to that Will by furnishing the Means by which it may be actualized. Pursuing that context, the Son represents the result of the union between Will and Means, being the Will’s actuality in Creation.

Key to understanding the Divine Family is the notion of complementary otherness implicit in the relationship. The importance of complementary otherness is its very partiality, which in the incompleteness of one partner without the other removes the exaltation of the individual. Even, or perhaps especially in the Godhead, ego is deliberately minimized by design.

It is my conviction that the Father Himself, in his own selfless nobility, willed the implementation of His subordination to Family, with love as His motive for doing so. Parting Himself in two, He voluntarily limited His unrivaled personal sovereignty over the universe to a shared arrangement with that element of His former essence that we call the Holy Spirit. This parting created gender differentiation within the Godhead Itself As the Complementary Other to the masculine initiative essence of the Divine Father, the Holy Spirit necessarily possesses the responsive gender attribute of femininity.

This Family-based gendered view of the Godhead elevates several verses of Genesis 1 and 2 beyond mere descriptive images of mankind, as we are used to understanding them, to very elemental depictions of the Godhead Itself.

Note in Genesis 2 that God described the state of Adam being without a companion as not good. Being without a feminine companion would render Adam, for all practical purposes, genderless. The attribute of gender was important to God, which suggests that God considers gender and its exercise as intrinsically good, rather than bad. The passage goes out of its way to make that plain. In an interpretation more in line with what the Scripture suggests, the formation of Eve from Adam echoes rather distinctly the Father’s extraction of the Holy Spirit from His own essence.

Scripture tells us that before man’s fall from grace the primal couple was not ashamed of their nakedness. It was only after the Fall that sexual shame came into the picture.

In Matthew 19 Jesus repeats Adam’s statement in Genesis 2 regarding Adam and Eve’s gender-based relationship in which the man cleaves to his wife, but attributes the act to God Himself, concluding that what God had put together, no man should separate.

In the like passage in Ephesians 5, Paul repeats the event of God having made man in male and female versions for the purpose of the man’s leaving father and mother and cleaving to his wife to become one flesh. Then he makes the starkly momentous statement that he’s really talking about the relationship between Jesus and His Church.

Adam’s quote about leaving father and mother and cleaving to his wife is obviously important to God, not only because it was echoed by Jesus and Paul, but makes the claim that Jesus, as a Member of the Godhead, will marry the Church. The implication in this is that if gender union applies to one of its Members, it places the attribute of gender squarely in the Godhead, suggesting that gender is an attribute shared by the Father and Holy Spirit as well. Moreover, gender appeals to our intuition, making sense of the relationships within the Godhead. It is easy to picture the fruit of the union between Father and Holy Spirit being the Son Jesus, the glorious actualization of the Will as given birth by the Divine Means.

Here’s the great beauty of what the Father did in his selfless parting of Himself to form the Holy Spirit: what He gave up in doing that He regained in love in union with Her. That is the true significance of Adams words: “a Man shall cleave unto to his Wife, and they two shall be one Spirit.”

Just as Adam’s side was rent to form Eve, and as the Church was formed out of Jesus’ pierced side on the cross, so did the Father part Himself to form the Holy Spirit, with Whom He united in love to form Jesus Christ.

God intended our relationship with Him to be intimate and romantic. Only through our perception of the Godhead in Family terms can we begin to appreciate and love God as Jesus calls us to do in Matthew 22:37 and 38:

“. . .You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.”