I take it the fact that that isn't what the term 'immaculate conception' refers to is beside the point.
It was in any case an impressive feat of ingenuity on Gregory's part. One was required, I fully admit that.
Given that fact I was Catholic for 20 plus years, you could perhaps have forgiven an overfamiliarity with that particular choice of words.
In either event, you cannot drag DemP over the coals because regardless of what you think god
is, the Christian god presented itself as male. Twice. It ‘seeded’ a woman (a ‘male’ act) and was born as a man. Even if it had to do the first of these in order to manifest itself, it didn’t have to engender as a male by birth. Zeus carried a god who would be ‘twice born’ in his thigh, subverting his own gender and Vishnu rather beautifully placed his whole self within Devaki, subverting the need to have any conception and by extension, committing an act that could be interpreted as male at all.
Proto-Christianity’s need to have its own ‘miraculous birth’ myth has, unintentionally or not, engendered it’s deity. Now of course I’m not saying by extension that the Christian god
is male, just that it has presented itself as such. Why should we be disputing that? Queer theologians often get lost in the fugue of defining god as essentially sexless or ‘suprasexual’ based almost entirely on an external perception of god (and I dare say it for some, belief that this ‘ought to the be the way things are anyway’) yet pay little attention to the implications of god actually presenting itself in an engendered form recognisable to us.
What gender something presents itself as is more important to me than what gender, if any, a third party would allocate to it. I’m not going to suspend that approach for a deity. (Now of course we have the ‘third’ part of god; the spirit, in which there’s debate over whether it’s masculine, feminine or genderless which for me has the same substance as trying to debate the gender of air.)
Looking at the issue of sexuality in general, if we roll back modern heteronormativity (an unfortunate hangover that Pauline Christianity itself has left the western world) to a more ancient ordering; namely that ‘sexuality’ was divided into those acts and relationships that were supportive of the social hierarchy (procreative but also between a superior male and inferior male) and those that subvert this (two adult free men or any female/female relationship) then this allows us to regain a sense of ‘place’; namely that adult men should never be passive and women should never be active (see David Halperin). When dealing with the NT, we are dealing with a Greek ‘re-orientation’ of the narrative to fit their own audience. Much of that is lost on us. However under no circumstances could god ever be considered passive, which is why he impregnates Mary and why he is presented in birth as a male. Dworkin hits the nail on the head here; insemination as an act is an act of
greater maleness than committing a mere sexual act because it redeems a man from the ‘gender ambiguity of any sex act he might commit for his own pleasure.’ Which is why god doesn’t do what other ancient gods do and commit the deed himself.
Inseminating Mary is evidently more ‘male’ than actually being born in a male form. God did both of these things. At least according the Greeks. And according to the Greek ideal, he would have had to.
As Ernest has perhaps touched upon, though I know he approaches this from a slightly different angle, the adoptionist position (which as you know I contend was the intentional position and was the position on the nature of Jesus that I last held before I lost my faith - so I will admit my bias there) eliminates that in part. Jesus was chosen by god. It just so happened that it chose a human male as a son. A ‘son’ can belong to a mother or a father or a parent of another gender. There’s no need for god to inseminate a female nor be born in the form of a man. Nor does it open god up to quite legitimate, even if uncomfortable accusations of adultery.
The ‘real’ answer to all of this if any answer can be found, including indeed what position Mary Magdalene held, is more likely to be found outside the New Testament and therefore, strictly speaking, outside of Christianity.
Poll
