23 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in devotional Tags: artillumina, lent
Last year during Lent I used Artillumina reflections to go on a creative journey through the wilderness: drawing, writing, imagining, praying. It was such a great experience I will use these beautiful reflections again, this year inspired by stations of the cross: if you don’t have Lenten plans yet, I recommend you check it out:
http://artillumina.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/a-new-journey/
We, She and He – 3 books by Robert A. Johnson
23 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in love and sexuality Tags: He, marriage, Psyche and Eros, Robert A. Johnson, romantic love, She, The Fisher King, Tristen and Iseult, We
We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (New York; Harper One, 1983)
She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, Revised Edition (New York; Harper, 1989)
He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, Revised Edition (New York; Harper, 1989)
Sometimes I wonder why I read Jungian psychology books – they always send me into such a spin! But then, that is exactly why I read them – the desire for transformation. Wrestling with God like Jacob so that by cerebral understanding I might at least have the illusion that I can contain the pains and joys of life.
I read He and She a while ago in order to work on questions of gender. RJ takes the Fisher King/Parsifal/Holy Grail myth in He, and the Psyche-Eros myth in She, and uses them allegorically to draw insights about the essence of male and female psychology. It’s refreshing to read theory done through story telling: it relates to a different part of our brain and so draws out different insights. Personally, I relate to Psyche’s quest quite strongly and I do find it helpful as a tool for self-reflection. I think that this would be true regardless of one’s conclusion about gender as ‘essence’ – am I ‘essentially’ female and can be no other by virtue of my biology, or is gender more determined socially and therefore has only culturally specific articulations.
Here’s a link to an english translation of the original Psyche myth by Apuleius.
And the original Fisher King myth in its English incarnation by Thomas Malory.
The present reason why I’ve just read We is because I am working with the analogy of falling-in-love as a description of ‘conversion.’ That’s been really fun and I has gone into a couple of different projects about love and spirituality: an essay for general readership; a sermon series; and a prelude to my ongoing academic study. In We RJ reflects on the myth of Tristan and Iseult (also known as Iselda) from the middle ages. Tristan is a fine upstanding Knight, loyal to his King, until he accidentally drinks a love potion with the King’s intended bride, Iseult. They fall madly in love and defy all sense of right and common sense in order to be together.
If you want to read the Tristan-Iseult myth go here.
RJ discusses the psychology of love as a cultural phenomena in the West. He describes it as our obsession; our pathology; our replacement for religion in a secular age. As our culture moved away from seeking meaning in religious notions of transcendence, we projected those spiritual needs onto our human relationships. Romance has become our religion. Indeed! A case in point: a saw the new Working Dog movie last week, called Any Questions for Ben? (For overseas readers: these Working Dog are Australian legends!) Poor Ben is going through a quarter life crisis: he feels cut adrift, lost, yearning for something more and for his life to ‘mean something.’ So does he turn to religion, spirituality or even psychotherapy? No, he turns to love! He finds it within himself to commit to one woman and trusts in that relationship to satisfy these inadequacies he feels.
There is a pressing need to address the unrealistic expectations on intimate human relationships of all kinds – parental, romantic, platonic, etc. If we seek ‘god’ in a human person we will always be disappointed. But more subtlety, if we seek the source for our own personal transformation in another person, we too easily fail to integrate any fleeting transcendence within ourselves. It is not that God is absent from human relationships, indeed, frequently we experience the wonderful grace of God in our intimate relationships, but the source of God is not located solely within them as the object of our affection. It is a glimpse of heaven, but we live here and now on earth.
Here’s a little passage:
“In the symbolism of the love potion we are face to face suddenly with the greatest paradox and the deepest mystery in our modern Western lives: What we seek constantly in romantic love is not human love or human relationship alone; we also seek a religious experience, a vision of wholeness. Here is the meaning of the magic, the sorcery, the supernatural in the love potion. There is another world that is outside the vision of our ego-minds: It is the realm of psyche, the realm of unconscious. It is there that our souls and our spirits live, for unknown to our conscious Western minds, our souls and spirits are psychological realities, and they live on in our psyches without our knowledge. And it is there, in the unconscious, that God lives, whoever God may be for us as individuals.” (p. 53)
I still have a barrage of questions (which is probably quite obvious in the obscurity of some of this post) but the fact that archetypal theory has the capacity to articulate the quest for Life in God, is to me, invaluable.
love is life itself
14 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in love and sexuality Tags: love, poetry
“I know who you are”
declared his gaze
and I fell over once again
stumbling like a cripple
paralysed by longing
desiring
hoping.
If only love were rational
and could be brought into line by cognitive will.
Instead
love rises up from the depths
and until it is free
it is the leviathan of dark waters.
Love is but a made up word
and should not be expected to carry the weight
of the experience it is striving to name.
And yet I find I need to say those words ‘I love you’
and I need to hear those words ‘I love you’
and I need to know those words ‘I love you’
in power and in truth.
It is simple.
I am summed up by these four bless-ed letters
containing all life and meaning
and all I ever want ever again
is to love and be loved.
Love
is life itself.
The Feminist, Postcolonial, Asian Theology of Kwok Pui Lan
10 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in contextual theology Tags: Asian Feminist Theology, Asian theology, Feminist theology, Kwok Pui Lan, Postcolonial theology
Unsurprisingly, exhaustion kicked in after my final Masters essay, so it’s taken me a while to put the link up on the reddresstheology writing page
for any who might be interested. Parts of this research were fascinating. Can’t say I agreed with everything, can’t even say I understood everything! But it was invaluable being so far outside of my own perspective.
Kwok Pui Lan is a Hong Kong born woman who lives and works as a scholar in the United States. Click here and you’ll go through to her blog. The Asian culture is so very different to my own – born and bred to parents with English ancestry in Melbourne, Australia. I realised that my own critique of Enlightenment modernism had not gone far enough to deconstruct the power structures of colonialism and the reality of the Anglo-European captivity of most Christian theology. How to let Asians and Africans read the scriptures on their own terms rather than through the lens of white superiority? Big challenge!
Here’s the introduction and the first section offering a selected biography, which will tell you whether or not you want to follow the link in order to read the whole essay.
Kwok Pui-lan embodies the theology she writes. She is Asian, born of Chinese descent, raised in Hong Kong. She is woman, educated in the feminist scholarship of the West. She is global citizen, a member of the diaspora, multi-lingual, multi-cultural. She is Christian, a member of the imperialistic faith tradition aptly named Anglican. Kwok integrates all these blessings of life in a theology which is dynamic and open, constantly driven by questions and the inexhaustible resources for theological reflection living her multiple identities. Her vision of Christ is an epiphany of God, a unifying symbol of faith around which the story of real lives must constantly be told.
Kwok Pui-lan is a Hong Kong born scholar of international influence who currently serves as the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has published extensively in feminist theology, postcolonial criticism and biblical hermeneutics, self-consciously speaking as an Asian woman through-out her career, though she has lived and worked primarily in the United States since commencing her doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School in 1984. Her parents were Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong and practiced Chinese folk religion in the home. She became an Anglican Christian as a teenager, when she was privileged to have one of the first female ordained ministers in the Anglican communion.
Though her scholarly context has been the Western Academy, Kwok has maintained her Asian identity, involving herself with women theologians from marginal global contexts. In 2011 she served as President of the American Academy of Religion, which she saw as a significant step bringing recognition to minority groups in America. Kwok says, “I decided to run for the AAR presidency because I wanted to stand up for others…as leaders, we have to bring the tribe along. Those of us who are pioneers have the responsibility of opening the door a little wider for others to come.”1
The dynamic of Kwok’s life journey is shared by many women theologians in the current postcolonial global context, represented in the organisation now called PANAAWTM: Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry. The original network was established in the same year that Kwok arrived in the United States, and is evidence of the emergent voice of Two-Thirds world theologians over the past three decades. In a co-authored paper for the twentieth anniversary of PANAAWTM, Kwok identified several ‘clusters’ of issues characteristic to the way women in this network do their theology. They critique the power structures of colonialism; seek an inclusive theological anthropology, examine the objectification of the body and sexuality; seek an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates difference; and ground all this in daily spiritual practice.
Love’s Work by Gillian Rose
05 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in love and sexuality Tags: gillian rose, love, love's work, unhappy love
(Vintage: London, 1997)
In the midst of an emotionally difficult period over Christmas, I read Gillian Rose’s astounding book, Love’s Work. Written in the final years of her life whilst she battled Ovarian Cancer, Rose seeks to describe what love is, and the meaningful place it has in any life worth living. Rose died aged 48 years.
There was a particular passage which startled me into cessation. I’d been ploughing towards Christmas, as most of us in the West do if we have friends and family and a pretence of importance, and I could do nothing from that moment but pause and feel all the feelings of life. Love catapults us into full engagement with life.
“However satisfying writing is – that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control – it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in his every-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To those this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation. There can only be that twin passion – the passion of faith.”
Gillian Rose was God’s grace to me this Christmas. Sublime. Effusive. Wrapping me up in the safety of womanly love and care. All my questions about intimacy, betrayal and redemption were cradled in her exquisite writing about love of various kinds. But most movingly for me, is her chapter on ‘unhappy love.’
“In personal life, people have absolute power over each other, whereas in professional life, beyond the terms of the contract, people have authority, the power to make one another comply in ways which may be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate. In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change. Imagine how a beloved child or dog would respond, if the Lover turned away. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself… Love is the submission of power.” (pp. 54-55)
For Rose, unhappy love is the passion of loss. Each of us tends toward those relationships which repeat our experience of loss, pummelling into us the lessons of our earliest love formations. However, love is always birthed from Beloved-ness. Sebastian Moore describes this as the Love of God woven beautifully into all God’s creatures, a memory of knowing oneself divinely loved by our Creator, triggered by some look or word from whatever archetypal man, woman or child is required to grab our psychic attention. The archetypal Lover need not even be aware of bestowing such a gift upon us! But if the Lover withdraws the gift, knowingly or otherwise, the Beloved is bereft, she must generate that love within herself without the mediation of her muse. Hence ensues “the initiate of an investigation into lovelessness. A challenge to that deprecating self-assumption.” We come face to face with the epic journey to recover our sense of Beloved-ness.
To deny the inevitable messiness, to numb the unavoidable pain, is to turn away from love’s work. Rose observes this as an incessant protestantism. Love’s work is to stay in the harsh reality of living, the glacially slow movements towards maturity, the discovery and love of our selves. “To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.”
“If the Lover retires too far, the light of love is extinguished and the Beloved dies; if the Lover approachers too near the Beloved, she is effaced by the love and ceases to have an independent existence. The Lovers must leave a distance, a boundary, for love: then they approach and retire so that love may suspire. This may be heard as the economics of Eros; but it may also be taken as the infinite passion of faith.”
It requires faith to stay in the game. Faith to believe that we are truly Beloved. Faith to sufficiently stand our ground as a Lover approaches. And faith to see the Face of God in it all.
Committed: A Love Story by Elizabeth Gilbert
07 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in love and sexuality Tags: committed: a love story, eat pray love, elizabeth gilbert, ferdinand mount, love, marriage, the subversive family
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010) Different editions seem to have different subtitles! Weird! I read the kindle edition.
A friend of mine had read this book and wanted to know what I thought of it. Elizabeth Gilbert is famous for writing Eat, Pray, Love and this is kind of (in the broadest sense of the word) a sequel and has itself become a New York Times best seller. In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert describes her quest for self-discovery post-divorce. She recaptures life through Eating in Italy, Praying in India and Loving in Bali. In Committed, Gilbert describes what happens to her Love Relationship when forced with the realities of life over the long haul.
Gilbert and her soulmate are confronted with the social necessity of marriage when Felipe is refused entry into the United States, where they had taken up residency as a couple. Another year of soul-searching travel ensues as they submit to the bureaucratic requirements of visa by marriage. Neither Elizabeth nor Felipe had any desire for (re)marriage and the book records Gilbert’s sometimes tortured attempts to find a cultural interpretation that works for them. It’s mostly entertaining story telling, and I know enough of the original scholarship to see she’s done her research properly, so it’s actually a pretty good, accessible exploration into the social construction of marriage. Best of all it has a happy ending!
The one thing I hadn’t come across before was the work of Ferdinand Mount, that Gilbert herself was surprised to unearth. ‘Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet,’ a proper English conservative by any stretch of the imagination, wrote a book called The Subversive Marriage (1992). He points out that no totalitarian regime in history has ever fully conquered the privacy of the marriage bed. Heres a quote:
“The family is a subversive organization. In fact, it is the ultimate and only consistently subversive organization. Only the family has continued throughout history, and still continues, to undermine the State. The family is the enduring permanent enemy of all hierarchies churches and ideologies. Not only dictators, bishops and commissars but also humble parish priests and cafe intellectuals find themselves repeatedly coming against the stony hostility of the family and its determination to resist interference to the last.”
So if you’re after a popular version of some of the reddress themes on sex, love and marriage, I’m happy to recommend Committed.
I really enjoyed some of the ‘famous quotes’ she uses to start her chapters, here’s some of my favourites:
“Marriage is a friendship recognized by the police.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
“be of love (a little)/ more careful/ than of everything” – e.e. cummings
“Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.” – Betty Friedan, The Second Stage
“Of all the actions of a man’s life, his marriage does least concern other people; yet of all the actions of our life, ’tis the most meddled with by other people.” – John Selden, 1689
Orthodox Theological Method VII
01 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in contextual theology Tags: orthodox theology
Essay series, part VII: What is distinctive about the way that Orthodox Theologians conceive of their task with reference to the work of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.
Feminist Orthodoxy
“Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s work “has constantly involved constructive dialogue with Western theological trends… and has also been at the forefront of renewed thinking in the past twenty years on questions of gender.”1 She thought that grappling with the role of women in the church was key to the success or failure of the ecumenical movement and that Orthodoxy had an important role to play in reinterpreting the Tradition and exposing falsified dogma.
“The customs I mentioned earlier are, as Metropolitan Anthony Bloom so forcefully said, “an insult to women.” They are customs that do not spring from the teachings of Christ but are leftover from the Old Testament, archaic beliefs. When confronted with these beliefs and practices, I have always been pulled in two directions: I have always been pulled in two directions: one is a longing to fight them in the name of the authentic Tradition which, as Vladimir Lossky said, is the ‘critical spirit of the Church.’ The other is just to give up, pretend to accept them in order not ‘to scandalise the weak ones.’ In doing this, however, I run the risk of scandalising other ‘weak ones’ who may draw back and run away from the Church as fast as they can.”2
In a text on the full value of womanhood, Behr-Sigel models the distinct Orthodox theological method by first locating the relevant Scripture – Genesis, chapter one – then reviewing the Church Fathers to examine how these texts might be understood. Has little ‘t’ tradition been mistaken? She asserts that though they concluded men and women are equal, they also concluded that women and men should hold different positions in the church. “How can this apparent inconsequence be explained?” Behr-Sigel asks.3 “The time seems to have come to undertake a serious theological examination and clarification of all these complex factors [that influenced the Church Father's practice of a male clergy], and to do it in the spirit of the Fathers: e.g. not the spirit of a sclerosed conservatism, but the spirit of creative faithfulness, e.g. the dynamic authenticity of Tradition.”4
She goes on to make a careful distinction between what the Church Fathers said about Scripture, and what the Church Fathers said about their own context. The former Behr-Sigel takes as authoritative, the latter she takes with greater latitude: for it is not the Church Fathers on their own in which the Tradition resides, but the Church Father’s interpretation and application of Scripture in Sobornost. Behr-Sigel receives the biblical principles first observed by the early Church Fathers, that Scripture instructs us to believe men and women are equal in essence, in their humanity, and in their capacity for God. Then she asks: How does that now play out in our culture, as opposed to theirs? This opens up a new way of faithfulness to the Tradition.
Conclusion
Behr-Sigel fostered great hope that twentieth century Orthodox theology might provide a meeting place of East and West in a post-Enlightenment moment. She recalls that when first converted she and her friends “all hoped that Orthodoxy would open up and somehow become the matrix of a unified Christianity, faithful to tradition and at the same time open to the modern world.”5 For herself, she perceived that “I hesitated before making my decision. Finally, I decided I wasn’t giving up any of the positive aspects of Protestantism that I prized – like the respect for one’s freedom of conscience – but would gain roots in an extremely rich tradition, that of una sancta catholica apostolica, one holy catholic church.”6
The work of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel demonstrates the unique contribution that Orthodox theology has to offer in the twentieth and twenty-first century theological debates. In a century where old borderlines eroded with the cultural and intellectual end of the Modern era, Orthodoxy has become a constructive critical voice for a Western hermeneutic. This influence is summarised by the unique understanding of Tradition as the voice of the Holy Spirit in the Church. But underlying this beautiful simplicity lies a distinct intellectual heritage – non-dualistic, Trinitarian, spiritual and discerned through the practice of prayer and worship.
1 Williams (2005) p.584
2 Behr-Sigel (1991) p.9
3 Behr-Sigel (1982) p.374
4 Behr-Sigel (1982) p.374-5
5 Behr-Sigel (1990) p.14
6 Behr-Sigel (1990) p.15
(if you want further reference details follow the links through the ‘writing’ page)
Orthodox Theological Method VI
31 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in contextual theology Tags: orthodox theology
Essay series, part VI: What is distinctive about the way that Orthodox Theologians conceive of their task with reference to the work of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.
Biblical Exegesis
In the Enlightenment era sources of authority have been dealt with as separate entities that butt up against each other vying for priority. Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience came most commonly to be viewed as distinct sources, with or without a hierarchy depending upon where one stood in the post-Reformation church. The non-dualistic dynamism of Orthodoxy does not conceive them to be in opposition. “Scripture must be interpreted by the Spirit and the Spirit is in the church, therefore, Scripture and Tradition work together, never separated or opposed to each other.”1 Scripture is clearly regarded as the supreme, divinely inspired source of revelation and maintains the kind of elevated position of the Word in Reformed traditions. However, “tradition becomes the initial and fundamental source of Christian theology – not in competition with Scripture, but as Scripture’s spiritual context.”2 Without the corporate discernment of Tradition, there would only be individual, subjective interpretations of Scripture. “Scripture is sufficient but tradition necessary to take it beyond the realm of the individual.”3
When an Orthodox theologian does theology, they consistently start with the relevant Scripture then go the Church Fathers for the first interpretation of what those texts means. But this in essence is a drive towards personalism and Sobornost. “Theology, therefore, is not simply a science, using Scripture as initial data; it also presupposes living in communion with God and people, in Christ and the Spirit, within the community of the church. Biblical theology is of course, the best theology, but being truly biblical implies living communion in Christ, without which the Bible is a dead letter.”4
Behr-Sigel argued that the competition for ‘authority’ between Scripture and Tradition is misplaced, because the theological exercise is personal, not abstract. Note again the Trinitarian dynamic in the way theological authorities are conceived:
“For the Christian, supreme authority belongs to God revealed in his Son on whom the Spirit of the Father rests: one God in three persons, whose being, whose common nature, is love. All authority in the Church comes from him and is exercised in his name: in the name of God transcendent who speaks to humans, who reveals himself to them and gives them his gifts, the gift of his own life: a treasure that we have, as the apostle Paul writes, ‘in earthen vessels’ (2 Cor 4:7). It is in this tension between the divine and human aspects of the authority with which some people are invested in the Church that we find, at one and the same time, the nobility and difficulty of its exercise.”5
1 Florovsky (2003) p.113
2 Meyendorff (2003) p.82
3 Florovsky (2003) p.98
4 Meyendorff (2003) p.82
5 Behr-Sigel (2001c) p.87
(if you want full referencing details follow the links to the essay via the ‘writing’ page)
Orthodox Theological Method V
30 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in contextual theology Tags: orthodox theology
Essay series, part V: What is distinctive about the way that Orthodox Theologians conceive of their task with reference to the work of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.
Trinitarian Pneumatology
The distinctive Greek philosophical heritage is enshrined in Orthodox conceptions of Trinity which refuse to dissolve the person of the Holy Spirit into a definition shaped by logical foundationalism. We have already identified that the very task of theology is conceived by Orthodoxy as an exercise in spiritual discernment. As Behr-Sigel says, “we must listen to the Spirit of God and try and find the real meaning of the ecclesial Tradition”1 The work of the Spirit is integral to theology only in so far as theology is the work of Revelation of the Triune God. Vladimir Lossky explains, “theology will be faithful to tradition insofar as its technical terms – ousia, hypostasis, consubstantiality, relations of origins, causality, monarchy – serve to present more and more clearly the initial mystery of God the Trinity without obscuring it with trinitarian deductions derived from another starting point.”2
This pattern of community, personalism and mystery in theology flow outward from it’s Trinitarian core to dominate the Orthodox theological agenda. For example, Behr-Sigel’s vision for an inclusive church is “in the mind of our God, One in three persons: a community, or rather a communion of persons in his likeness, men and women ineffably different but equal in dignity, free and responsible, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”3 In other words, distinction within the Trinity cannot be forced to their extremes – we must stay in the apophatic realm lest our arrogance results in heresy for claiming too much. Analogously, we must hold lightly to distinctions between gender, lest we lose the primary emphasis on all humanity created in the image and returning to the Triune God.
1 Behr-Sigel (1991a) p.18
2 Lossky (2003) p.175
3 Behr-Sigel (2008) p.7
(if you want the full referencing details follow the links through the ‘writing’ page)
Orthodox Theological Method IV
29 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in contextual theology Tags: orthodox theology
Essay series, part IV: What is distinctive about the way that Orthodox Theologians conceive of their task with reference to the work of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.
Philosophical heritage
Credal debates of the fourth and fifth century, continuing until the final schism between East and West in the eleventh, reveal diverging streams of philosophical conceptions of truth and knowing, anthropology and metaphysics. A tendency towards dualistic and concrete definitions has predominated in the West whereas a more mystical metaphysic has influenced the East. Hence, “Orthodox theology does not fit in the category of liberalism or conservatism as developed in Western Christendom.”1 Lossky argues that “the very principle of relations of opposition is unacceptable to Orthodox theology.”2 Which means in practice that apophatic theology is normative, but methods vary.3
Through the legacy of Sergei Bulgakov at St Sergius Theological School in Paris where she studied and worked, Behr-Sigel entered into the debates about the place of wisdom, ‘Sophia’, and the divine feminine. Vladimir Soloviev developed these interests most fully in nineteenth century Russia. He observed a parallel between sophia and theosis – the process of being and becoming one, an integration of the present empirical universe with that mystery which is beyond it.4 Behr-Sigel neither embraces the divine feminine fully, as Bulgakov did, nor rejected the bulk of it, as did Lossky and Meyendorff. Rather, she takes a more integrative path alongside the Orthodox Tradition of theotokos which results in a unique approach to the feminine in religious philosophy. Rather than an object of veneration, Mary’s status as the mother of the Christ directs the Christian away from herself towards the Trinitarian God and she becomes instead a model of the faithful’s right response to God. She herself is not the divine feminine, yet she opens the way for it. Mary is “the image and personification of the Spirit-bearing Church, the womb of the new humanity.”5
1 Meyendorff (2003) p.93
2 Lossky (2003b) p.169
3 Lossky (2003a)
4 Williams (2005) p.573
5 Behr-Sigel (1991b) p.204
