By now all the world knows that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, doesn't think God is male or female.
Welby, who's popularly known as Justsin, dropped this theological bombshell at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, stating, “God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father. God is not male or female. God is not definable."
Good heavens, there was everyone thinking the necessary Being of the Deity was just a scary old bloke in the sky with a beard. Now we know, thanks to Justsin, that God's a bit more than that and we can only speak of the Creator by analogy.
We know where Justsin's earthshaking logic leads. God's a perfect spirit, beyond gender so, drum roll... we should have wimmin priests and bishops, trans education in church schools, and get rid of all those pesky male personal pronouns invented by the patriarchy to keep the people down.
Let's go further, in the bold spirit of boundary breaking Justsinian theological inquiry.
God's neither male nor female, obviously, so we deploy gendered language to describe the divinity as a kind of construct. And what's human gender but an invention, a construct? Which means that hybrid no-sex transsexuals reflect the reality of God better than anyone else. So make them bishops.
The problem with this, apart from the fact that it's completely wrong, is that some analogies are better than others and that the ones we use, as Christians, are definitively revealed in the Person of Christ, who was notoriously a Man and taught us to pray to God as Father. Geoffery Kirk, at Ignatius, makes the point and you can read it here.
But feel free to break with revelation in favor of the spirit of the age, disregarding the truth given to us by the Word made Flesh. Go right ahead, disobey your Sovereign King and see where it gets you.
Just don't be surprised if you wake up to find a demon gnawing on your shinbone.
Viva El Cristo Rey,
LSP
