Jots and Tittles

Her first thing is a Mormon painting of God as light - it shows some kind of ziggurat-looking thing, with a big beam of light coming out of the top a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, even down to the people shielding their eyes from the light.  And apparently the class has a good sense already of what she wants to hear, because the first girl pipes right up and says "light is genderless," bringing about a big long talk about how, yes, in fact, God is not male and therefore we can refer to God as female too.  Actually I don't see the logic there at ALL, now that I think of it.  You're insisting that, a) God is not male, and that b) God is androgynous.  And somehow, from those two premises (both of which are, strictly speaking, correct), you draw the conclusion that it's ok to refer to God as female.  Now, it would seem to me that if you were really being honest with yourself, you would have just as much of a problem referring to God in feminine terms as you do referring to God in masculine terms, but that's not what we see at all, is it? Hmm.  She ridicules people for resisting the idea of calling God "Goddess," yet isn't "Goddess" much more obviously gendered than God?  I mean, even Lynn has no problems calling God "GOD" (though it gets freaking ANNOYING to listen to someone speak whose pronouns have mysteriously vanished...).  Indeed, I seem to recall on a certain creepy recording of the Re-Imagining conference hearing women sing, "Sophia, Creator GOD, shower us with your love" and the like.  It's actually a rather gender-neutral word.  "Goddess," on the other hand, well, there's no mistaking that deity's sex.    Or the fact that said deity HAS a sex.

So, moving on.  Her next image was from the ceiling of some church in German, depicting the Trinity.  Astute listeners will hear me pipe up (I was rather hoarse, for some reason, but that's me) when she asks why she chose that image, saying that the Holy Spirit is depicted as female.  She even goes so far as to say that it's OBVIOUS that the Spirit is female.  Actually, while it is rather feminine compared to the other two figures, it's much more androgynous than it is female, but I knew where she was going and I didn't much want to beat around the bush, so I just fed it to her.  She makes the common claim that the church referred to the Spirit as "she" up until the middle ages (we'll deal with that in a second), and then, well, folks, we have the cincher.  For what do we have when we reach 25:21 in our recording?  I'll give a direct quote:

"...it is the Holy Spirit as Wisdom, as Sophia..."

DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!  We have a winner, folks!  There she is, on day 2 of class, Sophia, in all her heretical glory!  Now, the Holy Spirit is Paraklētos in the original Greek, and a masculine noun.  The Greek pronoun used (in John - very rarely is a pronoun used for the Spirit elsewhere, though even when a different pronoun is used I have always found it to share this characteristic) is autos, a NEUTER pronoun.  In other words, "autos" is the equivalent of "it."  So of course you can't make the claim that the original Christians thought of the Spirit as female.  Nor in the Latin is it a gendered pronoun, as far as I can tell (Troy, please correct me on this if I'm wrong); it's translated as "ille," which, so far as I can tell, is neuter.  The few gendered pronouns I discovered in the English translations were all "he" anyway.  So... yeah.  Someone brought up that, in his Presbyterian church, the Spirit was always referred to as "She," and someone else mentioned that it was the same in her church (Baptist, I believe).  Mitchell was surprised, though I was not, and I mentioned that it depended on the church, for there are some churches which are orthodox (I didn't say THAT part, but still).  She agreed, it depends on the pastor (so true!), and mentioned that it was not so in her Methodist church growing up - she apparently has a lot to say about her Methodist church, or so she hinted.

The rest... well, some of the pictures were sickening, one was of a Black God which was superior to the evil demon White God (rolls eyes), one of an emaciated figure on a cross whose face is the picture of pure agony (and one of the most gruesome images I have ever seen), but really nothing remarkable.  I don't much care for what was said, but there's nothing particularly noteworthy except for the repeated implication that we all think of God as a big old white man on a throne with a beard and that is, of course, the wrong image.  I seem to recall C. S. Lewis mentioning something along the lines of "no one was ever harmed/damned for thinking of God as an old man with a beard," but meh.  She also said that doves were symbolic of Jesus, not always the Spirit, which struck me as odd, as I've never seen Jesus symbolized as a dove, but again, meh.  That's something I might look into later, if I decide I care that much.