Women and the Gender of God by Amy Peeler

Author:Amy Peeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Too Unique?

A pressing concern remains, namely, that Jesus is different from all other humans. Granted, all assertions of the incarnation affirm some degree of Jesus’s unique nature. Being God incarnate puts him into a category all his own. The concern is more precise. Some have also worried that Jesus’s difference from all other humans by virtue of his singular maternity could destroy the aim of the incarnation itself, the recapitulation of the human race. One might respond that accepting the Christian narrative involves accepting truths outside the natural system—the resurrection being the chief example. Dead people do not normally rise, and babies do not normally exist without fathers. Embracing one element of the Christian confession seems to suggest the ability to embrace the other.

Such a retort, however, would be to miss the aim of this critique. Lincoln counters, “This is not an argument about the possibility of the miraculous but about the meaning of the alleged miracle.”58 The question at stake is not whether God can do this but whether God would accomplish the redemption of creation if God did do this.59 If Christ is different from all other humans by virtue of the virginal conception, then maybe it is impossible for his unique humanity to redeem any other human.

Tertullian speaks to just this problem in The Flesh of Christ: “A word of caution, however, must be addressed to all who refuse to believe that our flesh was in Christ on the ground that it came not of the seed of a human father, let them remember that Adam himself received this flesh of ours without the seed of a human father. As earth was converted into this flesh of ours with the seed of a human father, so also was it quite possible for the Son of God to take to Himself the substance of the self-same flesh, without a human father’s agency.”60 He recognizes the disjunct between Christ’s beginning and normal human beginning but still asserts that Christ took “our flesh.”

From this perspective, Jesus’s humanity may not be that different from others.61 Since all human existence is in some way contingent upon God, then Jesus’s contingency upon God’s act would be different, but he would still share contingency with all other humans.62 In relationship with God as well as other humans, he is dependent.63

Lincoln agrees with this. If God had to intervene with “a miracle that supplies missing genes, the result could still be human.”64 His objection is that “the resulting human product cannot be said to be either in solidarity or in continuity with the rest of the human race … but a special interventionist creation in which God treats male DNA differently from female and produces it separately.” He asserts that if Jesus were conceived without a male father, he would not be human as are other humans.

Lincoln claims that the lack of a male-supplied Y chromosome makes Jesus significantly different from others as to be salvifically ineffective. He appeals to Hebrews, chiefly because it is such a robust text for affirming the humanity of Jesus.

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