news of crisis in the RC church, from LifeSite News

Can't be male either though. Where the spirit is there is freedom. Slavers were all men.
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Does gentle, nurturing and persuasive ring any bells for you?

 

It's ironic that it is always those who don't subscribe to Anglican formularies, who try to inject confusion into Anglican doctrines.

You're exactly right. And I would add the consensus of the Anglican Divines which for us Anglicans is absolutely mandatory, under the Fathers, who were under Scripture.

The Anglican consensus is absolutely clear not only from centuries of translation of the Bible into English, but also from the Nicene Creed, which says,

"And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets."

It does not say the Lady; or the Being. Both of those options were eminently available, and nobody would've looked at them oddly if this is how our English divinity became expressed, especially if supported by underlying evidence.

But there was no evidence. And they did translate it into the masculine. And there are centuries and millennia of Anglican tradition (when we include Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic) which testifies to it with a unanimous voice.

 

i appreciated seeing this message today

 

Coming back from the "H.S. rabbit trail," I want to say that I like what ZachT wrote about this. Yet at the same time I think, looking at the greatly varying beliefs among RCs concerning critical RC doctrines, that the potential does exist for the development of disunity. That is, fairly large numbers of members could become motivated to leave the RCC for other churches or perhaps to splinter off (as have so many groups throughout the centuries), or even to stop going to church altogether. So I think that some of S. D. Wright's concerns are valid, even though his reasoning (colored as it is by his RC bias) is flawed. That organization is weakening, decaying. Already there are many members of that group who are RC in name only, and they stay RCINO only because they were raised as children to think of themselves in that category.

Wright naturally equates "the Church" with the organization rather than the body of redeemed, true believers in Christ. Thus, all non-Roman groups may as well be regarded, in his estimation, as heretics who are apart from the true faith. As one example of this mindset, I noted his comment at the end of Part 1: "To reassure readers, we affirm that the Roman Catholic Church is the mystical body of Christ, outside of which there is no salvation; that we profess and believe everything that she teaches; and that she remains in the world with all of her essential marks intact" (emphasis mine). Wright is repeating the traditional, long-held stance of the RCC.

 

Wheeling out the wicker man, if not blatently a straw one, of "It does not say the Lady; or the Being." does not settle the matter though. I don't think there has been any suggestion from anyone in here that the masculine terminology should ever be replaced by feminine titles. The issue is whether it is appropriate or necessary at all, ever, to assign a specific gender to the The Holy Spirit.

I don't see the necessity, (unless one has issues personally against femininity), apart from a justifiable aversion to rudely using 'it', of such a lively and gracious entity.
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I may be missing something here but I fail to see what guidance the passage you quoted offers on the actual gender, let alone the supposed 'masculinity' of The Holy Ghost. Have you spotted something in it that I am unable to discern?
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And of course we ALL know us men NEVER nag or get bossy, don't we.
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I presume that was aimed at me. I have not tried to inject confusion into Anglican Doctrine. I have not subscribed to the 39 Articles, however I have a great affection for them, and regularly have referred to them in debates here. It is clear that you take a divergent reading of Article 1 to me, in this thread. I am of course fine with that. That does not suggest to anyone that one of us does not take the Article seriously.

It is a matter of principle that I have not subscribed to something I take seriously, and in general terms accept. I have some concern with the wording of Article 5, mainly because whilst I accept some forms of a theology of double procession, I do not accept all forms of such a theology, and co-incidentally I do not insert the filioque when reciting the Nicene Creed (In line with three Oecumenical Councils and three sittings of the Lambeth Council) for a number of reasons one being that it proves to be a very imprecise way of expression such a theology. I have no intent to derail this thread, however felt a need to be clear. I am aware that my understanding of Article 6 is different to the understanding of Article 6 expressed by many members here. For me, Article 19 raises some concern as it is very specific in terms of who and very vague in terms of how - and I don't understand how Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Rome got singled out, while Constantinople and Armenia got off the hook.

So please don't slur me suggesting that I don't take the Articles seriously, or that somehow I am some sort of 2nd class Anglican because I have the the integrity not to subscribe to them, though clearly I have shown by action and argument that I assent to them.

On the matter of confusion, I am not confused, I have a view that suggests that God is before gender, and God is beyond gender, and that gender is part of that which God instils in us to reflect his image and likeness, and that is a proper understand of the complexity so profoundly put before us in the first chapter of Genesis.

In post #12, I referred to your post #9 where you had relied on the use of the masculine pronoun in John 14:25, and I simply pointed out that the Greek word rendered with that masculine pronoun was indeed not properly a masculine pronoun in the Greek. Rather than address that point, you accuse me of trying to inject confusion, where I would have to argue, quite to the contrary, I was trying to inject clarity and authenticity.

We have no doctrine of our own—we only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church enshrined in the Catholic creeds, and those creeds we hold without addition or diminution. We stand firm on that rock. We know how to bring to bear on our Christian devotion and creed all the resources of charity and reason and human understanding submitted to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So we have a freedom and embrace a faith which, in my belief, represents the Christian faith in a purer form than can be found in any other Church in Christendom. That is not a boast. It is a reminder to us of the immense treasure that is committed to our charge — the immense responsibility on us in these days to maintain unshaken those common traditions that we have inherited from those who have gone before us.
Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of Canterbury, quoted in Church Times, 2 February, 1951​

 

The three persons of the Trinity are all masculine; I think it is error to call them male, as that is a term applied to an embodied creature (namely, people). But the Bible unambiguously refers to God as a masculine being; this is not simply a matter of grammar or syntax.

EDIT: I understand the argument about the Heberew ruah, but this is taking a grammatical thread and weaving it into a theological blanket. It won't do.

Males are embodied and have masculine souls; females are embodied and have feminine souls. We don't know if the feminine aspect has any counterpart among spirit beings -- God himself and the angels are spirit beings, not embodied beings, and therefore do not have an embodied gender. But even the angels have a masculine aspect (we have no Biblical examples to the contrary, at any rate). When angels take on human form in the Bible, they do so in the male form.

Eve is woman, i.e., taken out of man (from Adam's side). God bifurcated his human creation into two genders, and only together in the act of marriage do they become "one flesh". This melds not just the male and female body, but also the masculine and feminine spirit. This joining is necessarily imperfect in a fallen world; only in Heaven will we truly become One in Christ. (Some argue that Adam only became male when Eve was created; that Adam was in some sense genderless at Creation. I find this argument unpersuasive because it goes against the plain meaning of Scripture, but you will run across this argument in the literature.)

Christ came to earth as a male for a reason -- he is the new Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-49).

 

I also want to point out that when you encounter the word "ruah" or "ruach" in the Old Testament which in the Greek is rendered pneuma, bear in mind that the Old Testmanent Hebrews do not hold to a Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead as Christians do, so the Old Testament writers clearly would not refer to the Holy Spirit as a Christian would. Most (all?) of the contested Hebrew occurrences come from the books of Genesis and Daniel, and none of them in my reading are theologically interesting to our discussion.

I must add that I am certainly no expert in hermeneutics or biblical languages, however, and I would be glad to be corrected if I am wrong.

 

I am reminded of a statement our effable fellow Ananias aptly observed - "Drama is a fine vehicle for Christian themes and stories." Below is a fitting example from Mental Floss in conjunction with this posted topic:

(https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67054/12-times-star-trek-and-sherlock-holmes-overlapped#:~:text=1. Spock quotes one of Sherlock Holmes’ most,whatever remains, however improbable, must be the solution.”)

"In one of the most recognizable moments in Trek history, Spock says, 'An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the solution.' The original quote, from the Holmes story The Sign of the Four, published in 1890, reads, 'How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?' "

 

I didn't want to insult so please don't take it personally. At the same time you'll understand that considering the last century of utter apostacy from Anglican orthodoxy, I would draw a straight line from not subscribing to something generations of Anglicans considered as hallowed, to rejecting something new which previous generations of Anglicans considered as hallowed.

You're simply going to be at a disadvantage in orthodox or traditionalist Anglican circles, whenever you lend the weight of your (not inconsiderable) acumen to some new alteration, some new retreat, or some new compromise with the world.

Suffice it today say that within traditional orthodox Anglicanism, the Holy Ghost, the sacred Third Person of the Trinity is a He.

 

Fail to see how that works.

I don't see how using what we have learned and come to understand, based on scripture and through the light of tradition and reason can yield me at a disadvantage, but there you go.

Interestingly, given that I have not actually argued against that position, but rather more seriously argued for an openness - and to remind people that this is not specifically an RCC issue as was first painted was my point. We are not Anglican because we are against the RCC, but rather for what we are for.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Genesis 1:1

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27​

If I had written this I am sure I would be being told it was speculative and odd that it should come from someone without an Anglican badge.​