Divine Femininity

This is a lesson from my high school Sunday class. I hope it will be of some benefit to you:

In our culture there has been a steady push against the secondary classmanship of women throughout most of history. Many of the issues and claims brought up by women throughout the first wave of feminism were valid. The right to vote, equal pay to men, the denormalizing of sexual harassment, and many other ills that have developed in western society have been and continue to be addressed.

Unfortunately, The Orthodox Church (that is, her people) have not been free of the times women cultural patterns lean toward sin and oppression. We see this clearly in writing from the church fathers such as St. Basil:

“In respect of chastity I see that the majority of men are illdisposed, and that their laws are unequal and irregular. For what was the reason why they restrained the woman, but indulged the man, and that a woman who practices evil against her husband's bed is an adulteress, and the penalties of the law for this are very severe; but if a man commits fornication against his wife, he has no account to give? I do not accept this legislation, I do not approve this custom. Those who made the law were men, and therefore their legislation is hard on women, since they have placed children also under the authority of their fathers, while leaving the weaker sex uncared for. God does not do so, but says Honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise...See the equality of God's legislation. There is one Maker of man and woman; one debt is owed by children to both their parents.
How then do you demand chastity, while you do not observe it...How, though you are equally a body, do you legislate unequally? If you inquire in the worse -- the Woman Sinned, and so did Adam. The serpent deceived them both; and one was not found to be stronger and the other weaker. But do you consider the better? Christ saves both by His passion. Was he made flesh for man? So He was also for the woman. Did he die for the man? The woman also is saved by His death. He is called the seed of David; and so perhaps you think the man is honored; but He is born of a virgin; and this is on the woman's side. The two, He says, shall be one flesh; so let the one flesh have equal honor. (The Fifth Theological Oration, Oration XXXVII)”

We read also St. John Chrysostom say thus of Christian marriage:

When we speak of the wife obeying the husband, we normally think of obedience in military or political terms: the husband giving orders to the wife and the wife obeying them. But while this type of obedience may be appropriate in the army, it is ridiculous in the intimate relationship of marriage. Obedience should not be confined to the wife; the husband should be obedient in the same way. St. Paul writes: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:22). Thus a good marriage is not a matter of one partner obeying the other but of both spouses obeying each other. (On Christian Marriage)

I should say also that when I say the Orthodox Church, I do not mean to infer the church celestial, that is the order of the saints of heaven and the ones in the grace of God throughout history. Rather I mean us, who are struggling throughout history. Not only this, we need to remember Christ teachings (Matthew 7:15) about many who are Christian in appearance only, but inwardly are quite ravenous and far from God.

Within the saints, and more so within the scriptures we see that there is definitely a divine feminine. We see it first in the very beginning of the bible:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Here we see that when it is says God made “man,” the word here is aw-dawm' which means “mankind.” That is why the scriptures follow up by saying that He made THEM male and female. For God made man(mankind) two.

This is a place where Judaism and Christianity differ from the two other largest world religions Islam and Hinduism. For in the Quran, we see only Adam born to be like God and in Hinduism, the myths can sometimes be fantastical, with woman being created from something like a river milk.

But we hold the teaching of the scriptures, that woman came from man and God made both equal. Why is this so important? Because we see the exact same thing in relation to God.

Proverbs 1


Out in the open wisdom calls aloud,
she raises her voice in the public square;
21 on top of the wall[d] she cries out,
at the city gate she makes her speech:

22 “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?
23 Repent at my rebuke!

Let us compare this to what St. Paul writes to the church in Corinth:

23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

And let’s read what it says in Matthew 4:17:

From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

What exactly are we seeing here? We are seeing the pattern set forth in the image of the trinity in marriage. The is the image of God’s expression of the feminine. And this is why we need to understand what does it mean to be feminine and what does it mean to be female?

We tend to limit what is masculine and what is feminine by what is biological. One of the ways we have seen a hard negative reaction to this is the assertion that biological sex is relative, fluid, or possibly exists on a spectrum.
However, when Christ came, He came as a male and existed in this world as a male. However, as the pre-incarnate Word, one of the ways we understand Christ is as the wisdom of God, the femininity of God begotten of the Father. I am not saying God is female as it pertains to sex. That’s not what we’re saying here.

So that might lead us to come to the same conclusions that many within our culture have come to, that the constructs of gender are merely social, that they hold no real bearings to our expressions as persons. However this is not true either. God created male and female as ways to both equally fully express the third, the hybrid, the one. This is why it says that when a man and a woman come together, the two become one. It is an image of the the trinity, all separate persons but completely and utterly one God. So man and woman are truly one being in marriage, while being two distinct persons, joined mystically by the third person of the marriage and the bonding agent, Christ.

Here we have an old Orthodox wedding ring. We see Christ in the middle, with the bride and groom on the sides.