The Divine Family in Christian Theology, and the Genome
by
Charles Graves
Some of the Christian concepts intrigue or even puzzle us, such as the belief that God is ‘Father’ or that Jesus was ‘Son’ of God. In St.John 20:17 Jesus, resurrected, told Mary Magdalene: ‘Touch me not…I am going to my Father and to your Father’. Some non-Christian religions might assert that this represents anthropomorphizing the Creator, calling God ‘Father’ in this way.
Moreover, as the Jewish religion proposed that the ‘Savior’ would come into the world and that he would be ‘of the seed of David’, this would categorize Judaism as believing in an anthropomorphic type of God, limiting the divinity to a particular family i.e. as descendant of King David.
Probably because of such belief the early Christians, speaking about their newly discovered ‘Messiah’, ’Christ’ or Savior, referred to Jesus as ‘Son of God’. Obviously, they were looking at Jewish genealogical tradition when they classified the Savior as ‘son’.
Judaism and Christianity have a kind of belief which is often expressed in terms of a divine family – whereby the Savior is ‘son’ of God and God is ‘father’. Unfortunately, for non-Christian religions, such a family nature of Christianity is difficult to accept. Jesus is, for some of them, simply an historical person who was perhaps inspired by God, but was not to be placed in a category as ‘Son’ of God -somehow differing from other creatures who could be classified as ‘sons of God’ (i.e. simply made in the divine image).
Although some world religions may not make such a distinction, still many religious believers of all faiths believe that human creatures have a link to the Divine in the sense that we humans are somehow partially-divine beings.
In Judaism and Christianity this human sharing in the divine nature is expressed often in a family setting such as existing as ‘sons of’, ‘father of’ etc. The essence of the Divine itself was described as ‘Holy Trinity’, i.e. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and for certain religious believers this might be considered as an anthropomorphizing of the Divine.
But, in fact, the sharing, among religions, that humans are considered as created ‘in the image of God’ means, essentially, that humans are to a certain extent ‘god-like’. It is perhaps by emphasizing such a conception, that Judaism arrived at the belief that God was comparable to humans in essence, and that the Savior would be part-human and part-divine. The Savior weas conceived of as the creature, or personality, who would ‘set all things aright’, show that ’right defeats wrong’ and that good acts are rewarded and bad actions punished. This was the role of the awaited ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’. And because he would be ‘in history’ it would be ‘normal’ for him to be both Divine and human. But the Jews, being a people whose history had been marked by the survival of a certain group consciousness, envisioned the Savior to be a members of one of their own royal families, i.e. of king David’s.
This particularism in Judaism is quite reasonable, however, since for anyone to be born in ‘this historical world’ such a person must, by the very nature of conception and birth, be born of some particular mother and father. So, although it may seem quite strange that the Messiah was a child of ‘Mary and Joseph’, born ‘at Bethlehem’ the child had to be born somewhere, and of some parentage, and the parentage as considered as being descended from king David was not too surprising given the particular beliefs of the Jews. Moreover, it is known by which family the Prophet Mohammed or Buddha were genetically produced, or the families of other religious leaders such as the guru Nanak (founder of the Sikhs) or Zoroaster. Although these are not considered ‘divine’ they were considered ‘divinely inspired’ in the same way as Jesus was.
So, the idea that religion can go without any ‘anthropomorphism’ at its foundation is not very arguable.
What is the connection of world religions with the new discoveries about genetics and the working of the brain? Certainly, biological studies of the genome and its actions must shed some light upon how religions have created concepts of the divine and ideas about family life related to the divine. If the Great Creator created humans somehow ‘in the divine image’ then this can only be manifested by human conception and birth, and genomics, and not otherwise. Each human is a product of its own parents and this reality includes genetic realities in previous ‘generations’ as genomics teaches us. It is by and through all these historical genetical realities that each of us is born ‘in the image of God’.
Thus, being ‘sons of God’ for us humans simply means being procreated. And being procreated means receiving the DNA of our parents which will largely determine our personality as we grown from childhood to adulthood and further.
Is there any relationship, thus, between Jesus being ‘Son of God’ in the divine sphere and ourselves being sons/daughters of our parents in the human sphere? Christianity teaches that the sonship of Jesus to his father (i.e,. God) occurred once on the historical level and occurs continually on the divine level (’in heaven’). Our ‘sonship or daughtership’ to God occurs only on the historical level, at least while we are alive and not yet dead. After death this ‘sonship/daughtership’ will be, somehow, transferred to the ‘heavenly’ level. Thus, in Christian theology, there is a possibility that our human filial and family relationships might exist at both the historical, terrestrial level and also at the divine ‘heavenly’ level, i.e. ‘beyond death’ and ‘forever’.
So, it is not so inconceivable that the historical person Jesus, after his death, could also be a ‘son of God’ in the same way as humans can be ‘children of God’ in heaven. The ‘Trinity’ would not seem to be so incredible after all.
The difference between the ‘divine Trinity’ and ourselves would be that Jesus lived a kind of ‘triangle’: first, in heaven; then, on earth; finally, again in heaven. We, on the other hand (unless we believe in the pre-existence of our souls) will have only a ‘straight-line’ existence from earth to heaven. This, of course, is not necessarily so, since some ‘pre-existence’ might be seen in our DNA – that we have been partially ‘existing’ all along through the ages through the lives of our ancestors. This ‘pre-existence’ has been, of course, a family affair, with mothers and fathers procreating all along the way (1)
From a biological perspective, then, the belonging of Jesus to a Divine Family, whereby he is ‘Son’ of God- is somewhat reasonable, given the nature of existence as we humans live it.
Besides, there are similarities in the fact that Jesus died, as any human does, and that he ‘ascended into heaven’ as humans may experience in a certain fashion, after their death.
In fact, Christianity claims that because Jesus did this ascension, the way is open for humans to ‘go up to heaven’ also. Thus, one of the particularities of Christianity is that Jesus is the link between our supposed human inability to ‘get to heaven’ and the real possibility of getting an ‘accession to the heavenly realm’. The ‘key’ to the Christian belief in ‘life after death’ is thus this Jesus.
The question must be posed as to whether this link (provided by Jesus) is ‘innate’ or not innate in humans. In what way could we believe that there is an aspect of the human brain’s working which allows such ‘link-activity’ of Jesus to exist physiologically in everyone. We have proposed something like this in our earlier writings when we discussed the ‘holy spirit’ existing in miniature among our neurons and their synapses. This is the ‘spirit’ or personality of each human being (of course determined by their ‘genome’). It has a ‘reflective’ quality, and we have shown that the Holy Spirit associated with Jesus after his baptism by John, is by a certain ‘echoing’, reflected in a human spirit, i.e. in a human’s ‘holy spirit’ (especially if the person is baptized as Jesus was, and baptized ‘in his name’). Hereby the link of Jesus with both earth and heaven is echoed in one’s brain and the one can hope, as Jesus did, to enter heaven one day.
The divine-human link represented by Jesus in his historical life and in his ascension to heaven is repeated in the Christians who are baptized. Its link is the Holy Spirit which came upon Jesus as a dove, and this type of linking being the Holy Spirit is spoken about (cf. the hymn Veni Creator at the ordination ceremony concerning deacons, priests and bishops) as the Holy Spirit being the unity existing between the ‘Father and the Son’. What brings ‘God the father’ and Jesus (the son) together in a ‘family relationship’ is the Holy Spirit (according to the Christian’s belief about the Holy Trinity).
Apparently, because the Holy Spirit links the ‘Father’ to the ‘Son’ in the divine world, so also the Holy Spirit, being echoed in the individual’s holy spirit, links us to a heavenly existence where the unity of the Holy Trinity is repeated for us in heaven as it was on earth. The Unity of the three ‘Persons’ of the Trinity will exist in the form of a certain unity between humans in heaven and the Holy Trinity in heaven.
There are a number of ‘links’ or ‘echoes’ in this system: (1) between the divine and human aspects of Jesus; (2) between the human Jesus inspired by the Holy Spirit and its echo within the individual believer’s spirit; (3) the link between the believer after death and the Persons of the Holy Trinity in heaven. These links all involve the Holy Spirit working by echoes existing in history and beyond history.
Even the three ‘echoes’ are in a trinitarian form. In relation to what we have proposed in other articles, the ‘victim’ in all these procedures is the ‘no-god’ aspect of our human lives. The Christian religion deals with this ‘no-god’ by bringing us into a special kind of ‘church family’ headed by the Holy Trinity. The Church represents the ‘divine family’ acting on an earthly level and, of course, it is somewhat symbolic of the divine family on a heavenly level. Members of the church will have, thus, some idea of what the heavenly Trinity will be like in their ‘future lives’. Thus, the supposed anthropomorphism of Christianity exists, in a certain sense, beyond the believer’s individual death.
But isn’t such anthropomorphism reasonable? After all, our earthly life is almost totally anthropomorphic, being as we are, created by families and in many cases, creating families? The life of most everyone is a ‘family matter’. Yet, many believe that ‘heaven’ and the ‘afterlife’ should not be similar to what happens in ‘this life’. It must be more ‘spiritual’, less ‘physical’ and hopefully, ‘happier’. Christianity, apparently, to some people seems to be promoting just the opposite with its Trinity, its Divine family. Do we really want to be part of a Divine family if our earthly families are so unholy or even despicable?
Here is the real problem facing the propositions in this article. Perhaps we could claim that the ‘church family’ will prepare us existentially to accept the Divine family when we ^get to heaven’. This is not too reassuring especially when we notice that certain church communities are so full of all kinds of human weaknesses. But, to justify a religion which has a Divine family at its head, we should look once again at the reality of our being determined by our DNA.
DNA exists because of us or even ‘in spite of us’. It is our family charter. It surrounds all our activities both internally and psychologically, and also exists outside of us in our family members. It makes us ‘part of a family’ which has existed in the past up to the present, and genetically from the beginning of time (it is a family including every living creature). We cannot ‘escape’ such a family and certainly, if there is anything ‘in heaven’, it must be something like our DNA family. And if we believe we are ‘created in the image of God’, then the DNA process is also ‘an image of god’ and, conversely, humans have a ‘god-quality’ in themselves.
Our genome, thus, ties us to our Creator both historically (in the long course of the universe’s history) and also existentially (we meet God face to face as in a judgement when we die as most religions propose). We meet in the context of our DNA and what we and our ancestors did. Much of what that represents is included in our DNA. Christianity states that all the bad features of it are ‘redeemed’ by Jesus, the ‘Son of God’. And, by the ‘echoing’ of the Holy Spirit in our spirits (as we have elaborated in earlier articles) we know about this redemption and are grateful for it.
But the person to whom we are grateful is not just some ‘divine essence’ to whom we pray and show our gratitude, Such gratitude could not have been possible if it
had not involved the ‘links’ mentioned above and the Holy Spirit inherent in each link.
This Holy Spirit is considered to be the ‘unity of the Father and the Son (Jesus)’.
Thus, the links themselves and the great ‘link’ (the Holy Spirit) have a family aspect, that between ‘father’ and ‘his son’. But such a generational link being masculine cannot exclude a feminine link, which is obvious in the procreation of every family. Patriarchalism in Judaism and Christianity is today being re-evaluated in order to include a certain matriarchalism in the modern era. This movement implies that the family of God in heaven includes women or else it is no family and is simply ‘male culture’. The family aspect of DNA, if it is ‘God’s creation’, must also be represented in the ‘heaven’ towards which human beings are supposedly ‘going’. The church family, which obviously is both male and female, cannot reflect or ‘echo’ a family in heaven which is only masculine in title or essence. The family in heaven, as matriarchalism would probably reassure us, includes mother and father. Thus, in some ‘matriarchalist’- oriented churches, the Virgin Mary – the mother of Jesus – is active in heaven along with the Father and the Son. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have emphasized this more than in Protestant churches, and ‘Mariology’ cannot be ignored in Christian history. Perhaps Mariology represents the Christian belief that (just as happens ‘on earth’ in human families) women are an integral part of the ‘Divine family’ in ‘heaven’ and that to deny this would show a misunderstanding of ‘life in heaven’.
With the advent of post-patriarchal concepts in Church life we can easily propose that the heavenly family of the Trinity includes Mary the mother of Jesus. In any case, even if we stay with traditional Trinitarian theology, the Holy Spirit, as the link between Father and Son, can itself be considered as representing a ‘feminine’ person such as ‘Holy Sophia’ or Holy Wisdom. In this sense, the Holy Wisdom (feminine) created the Son for the Father. But even if we do not use the Sophia concept to represent the feminine, it is evident that heaven is as filled with women as it is with men, and the link between the Holy Spirit in heaven and its working on earth (in the Church) shows us that women are just as much involved as men are.
Perhaps the early Church did not want to see any kind of sexual, family relations in heaven, but if man and women are created ‘in the image of God’ then both must be, like in our earthly DNA, integral elements of the ‘divine world’. To simplify it, we should recognize ‘the Great Mother’ in the Holy Spirit – the one who unites the Father with the Son in heaven and who directs the Spirit’s activity on earth.
As a footnote to this discussion we should remember that in every person’s DNA there are feminine and masculine elements – to such an extent that homosexuals, lesbians, bi-sexuals etc. – all types – can exist in the world as well as heterosexuals. The human genome has mixtures of all varieties of sexual orientation. Thus, it must somehow be true that the interior life of the Holy Trinity also includes all these various types of tendency. We cannot separate the human from the divine to the extent that almighty God created humans only from a masculine or heterosexual aspect of his interior divine life. If that were the case then how could the earthly human families (with various types of ‘sexualities’) ever exist in their present form? God in his/her essence must be multi-sexual. The Christian concept of the Holy Trinity cannot contradict the fact that the masculine and feminine elements are both present in the Book of Genesis (Hebrew/Christian Bible): ‘God created man (‘from the dust of the earth’) and woman (from the ‘rib-bone’ of man) and both were considered necessary for the survival of the human race. In both cases it was from the creating essence of God (dust of the earth, the rib-bone of man) that the human family was created.
When we see how many Christian churches have ordained women priests, ministers and bishops, all inspired by the Holy Spirit in their ministries, we become convinced that heaven is dominated by both female and male elements. But, unfortunately, it took a long span of history for this to be accepted in the Church.
(1) Cf. Kevin J. Mitchell Innate. How the Wiring of our Brains Shapes Who We Are (Princeton University Press) 2018, 293 pp.
Charles Graves
Moreover, as the Jewish religion proposed that the ‘Savior’ would come into the world and that he would be ‘of the seed of David’, this would categorize Judaism as believing in an anthropomorphic type of God, limiting the divinity to a particular family i.e. as descendant of King David.
Probably because of such belief the early Christians, speaking about their newly discovered ‘Messiah’, ’Christ’ or Savior, referred to Jesus as ‘Son of God’. Obviously, they were looking at Jewish genealogical tradition when they classified the Savior as ‘son’.
Judaism and Christianity have a kind of belief which is often expressed in terms of a divine family – whereby the Savior is ‘son’ of God and God is ‘father’. Unfortunately, for non-Christian religions, such a family nature of Christianity is difficult to accept. Jesus is, for some of them, simply an historical person who was perhaps inspired by God, but was not to be placed in a category as ‘Son’ of God -somehow differing from other creatures who could be classified as ‘sons of God’ (i.e. simply made in the divine image).
Although some world religions may not make such a distinction, still many religious believers of all faiths believe that human creatures have a link to the Divine in the sense that we humans are somehow partially-divine beings.
In Judaism and Christianity this human sharing in the divine nature is expressed often in a family setting such as existing as ‘sons of’, ‘father of’ etc. The essence of the Divine itself was described as ‘Holy Trinity’, i.e. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and for certain religious believers this might be considered as an anthropomorphizing of the Divine.
But, in fact, the sharing, among religions, that humans are considered as created ‘in the image of God’ means, essentially, that humans are to a certain extent ‘god-like’. It is perhaps by emphasizing such a conception, that Judaism arrived at the belief that God was comparable to humans in essence, and that the Savior would be part-human and part-divine. The Savior weas conceived of as the creature, or personality, who would ‘set all things aright’, show that ’right defeats wrong’ and that good acts are rewarded and bad actions punished. This was the role of the awaited ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’. And because he would be ‘in history’ it would be ‘normal’ for him to be both Divine and human. But the Jews, being a people whose history had been marked by the survival of a certain group consciousness, envisioned the Savior to be a members of one of their own royal families, i.e. of king David’s.
This particularism in Judaism is quite reasonable, however, since for anyone to be born in ‘this historical world’ such a person must, by the very nature of conception and birth, be born of some particular mother and father. So, although it may seem quite strange that the Messiah was a child of ‘Mary and Joseph’, born ‘at Bethlehem’ the child had to be born somewhere, and of some parentage, and the parentage as considered as being descended from king David was not too surprising given the particular beliefs of the Jews. Moreover, it is known by which family the Prophet Mohammed or Buddha were genetically produced, or the families of other religious leaders such as the guru Nanak (founder of the Sikhs) or Zoroaster. Although these are not considered ‘divine’ they were considered ‘divinely inspired’ in the same way as Jesus was.
So, the idea that religion can go without any ‘anthropomorphism’ at its foundation is not very arguable.
What is the connection of world religions with the new discoveries about genetics and the working of the brain? Certainly, biological studies of the genome and its actions must shed some light upon how religions have created concepts of the divine and ideas about family life related to the divine. If the Great Creator created humans somehow ‘in the divine image’ then this can only be manifested by human conception and birth, and genomics, and not otherwise. Each human is a product of its own parents and this reality includes genetic realities in previous ‘generations’ as genomics teaches us. It is by and through all these historical genetical realities that each of us is born ‘in the image of God’.
Thus, being ‘sons of God’ for us humans simply means being procreated. And being procreated means receiving the DNA of our parents which will largely determine our personality as we grown from childhood to adulthood and further.
Is there any relationship, thus, between Jesus being ‘Son of God’ in the divine sphere and ourselves being sons/daughters of our parents in the human sphere? Christianity teaches that the sonship of Jesus to his father (i.e,. God) occurred once on the historical level and occurs continually on the divine level (’in heaven’). Our ‘sonship or daughtership’ to God occurs only on the historical level, at least while we are alive and not yet dead. After death this ‘sonship/daughtership’ will be, somehow, transferred to the ‘heavenly’ level. Thus, in Christian theology, there is a possibility that our human filial and family relationships might exist at both the historical, terrestrial level and also at the divine ‘heavenly’ level, i.e. ‘beyond death’ and ‘forever’.
So, it is not so inconceivable that the historical person Jesus, after his death, could also be a ‘son of God’ in the same way as humans can be ‘children of God’ in heaven. The ‘Trinity’ would not seem to be so incredible after all.
The difference between the ‘divine Trinity’ and ourselves would be that Jesus lived a kind of ‘triangle’: first, in heaven; then, on earth; finally, again in heaven. We, on the other hand (unless we believe in the pre-existence of our souls) will have only a ‘straight-line’ existence from earth to heaven. This, of course, is not necessarily so, since some ‘pre-existence’ might be seen in our DNA – that we have been partially ‘existing’ all along through the ages through the lives of our ancestors. This ‘pre-existence’ has been, of course, a family affair, with mothers and fathers procreating all along the way (1)
From a biological perspective, then, the belonging of Jesus to a Divine Family, whereby he is ‘Son’ of God- is somewhat reasonable, given the nature of existence as we humans live it.
Besides, there are similarities in the fact that Jesus died, as any human does, and that he ‘ascended into heaven’ as humans may experience in a certain fashion, after their death.
In fact, Christianity claims that because Jesus did this ascension, the way is open for humans to ‘go up to heaven’ also. Thus, one of the particularities of Christianity is that Jesus is the link between our supposed human inability to ‘get to heaven’ and the real possibility of getting an ‘accession to the heavenly realm’. The ‘key’ to the Christian belief in ‘life after death’ is thus this Jesus.
The question must be posed as to whether this link (provided by Jesus) is ‘innate’ or not innate in humans. In what way could we believe that there is an aspect of the human brain’s working which allows such ‘link-activity’ of Jesus to exist physiologically in everyone. We have proposed something like this in our earlier writings when we discussed the ‘holy spirit’ existing in miniature among our neurons and their synapses. This is the ‘spirit’ or personality of each human being (of course determined by their ‘genome’). It has a ‘reflective’ quality, and we have shown that the Holy Spirit associated with Jesus after his baptism by John, is by a certain ‘echoing’, reflected in a human spirit, i.e. in a human’s ‘holy spirit’ (especially if the person is baptized as Jesus was, and baptized ‘in his name’). Hereby the link of Jesus with both earth and heaven is echoed in one’s brain and the one can hope, as Jesus did, to enter heaven one day.
The divine-human link represented by Jesus in his historical life and in his ascension to heaven is repeated in the Christians who are baptized. Its link is the Holy Spirit which came upon Jesus as a dove, and this type of linking being the Holy Spirit is spoken about (cf. the hymn Veni Creator at the ordination ceremony concerning deacons, priests and bishops) as the Holy Spirit being the unity existing between the ‘Father and the Son’. What brings ‘God the father’ and Jesus (the son) together in a ‘family relationship’ is the Holy Spirit (according to the Christian’s belief about the Holy Trinity).
Apparently, because the Holy Spirit links the ‘Father’ to the ‘Son’ in the divine world, so also the Holy Spirit, being echoed in the individual’s holy spirit, links us to a heavenly existence where the unity of the Holy Trinity is repeated for us in heaven as it was on earth. The Unity of the three ‘Persons’ of the Trinity will exist in the form of a certain unity between humans in heaven and the Holy Trinity in heaven.
There are a number of ‘links’ or ‘echoes’ in this system: (1) between the divine and human aspects of Jesus; (2) between the human Jesus inspired by the Holy Spirit and its echo within the individual believer’s spirit; (3) the link between the believer after death and the Persons of the Holy Trinity in heaven. These links all involve the Holy Spirit working by echoes existing in history and beyond history.
Even the three ‘echoes’ are in a trinitarian form. In relation to what we have proposed in other articles, the ‘victim’ in all these procedures is the ‘no-god’ aspect of our human lives. The Christian religion deals with this ‘no-god’ by bringing us into a special kind of ‘church family’ headed by the Holy Trinity. The Church represents the ‘divine family’ acting on an earthly level and, of course, it is somewhat symbolic of the divine family on a heavenly level. Members of the church will have, thus, some idea of what the heavenly Trinity will be like in their ‘future lives’. Thus, the supposed anthropomorphism of Christianity exists, in a certain sense, beyond the believer’s individual death.
But isn’t such anthropomorphism reasonable? After all, our earthly life is almost totally anthropomorphic, being as we are, created by families and in many cases, creating families? The life of most everyone is a ‘family matter’. Yet, many believe that ‘heaven’ and the ‘afterlife’ should not be similar to what happens in ‘this life’. It must be more ‘spiritual’, less ‘physical’ and hopefully, ‘happier’. Christianity, apparently, to some people seems to be promoting just the opposite with its Trinity, its Divine family. Do we really want to be part of a Divine family if our earthly families are so unholy or even despicable?
Here is the real problem facing the propositions in this article. Perhaps we could claim that the ‘church family’ will prepare us existentially to accept the Divine family when we ^get to heaven’. This is not too reassuring especially when we notice that certain church communities are so full of all kinds of human weaknesses. But, to justify a religion which has a Divine family at its head, we should look once again at the reality of our being determined by our DNA.
DNA exists because of us or even ‘in spite of us’. It is our family charter. It surrounds all our activities both internally and psychologically, and also exists outside of us in our family members. It makes us ‘part of a family’ which has existed in the past up to the present, and genetically from the beginning of time (it is a family including every living creature). We cannot ‘escape’ such a family and certainly, if there is anything ‘in heaven’, it must be something like our DNA family. And if we believe we are ‘created in the image of God’, then the DNA process is also ‘an image of god’ and, conversely, humans have a ‘god-quality’ in themselves.
Our genome, thus, ties us to our Creator both historically (in the long course of the universe’s history) and also existentially (we meet God face to face as in a judgement when we die as most religions propose). We meet in the context of our DNA and what we and our ancestors did. Much of what that represents is included in our DNA. Christianity states that all the bad features of it are ‘redeemed’ by Jesus, the ‘Son of God’. And, by the ‘echoing’ of the Holy Spirit in our spirits (as we have elaborated in earlier articles) we know about this redemption and are grateful for it.
But the person to whom we are grateful is not just some ‘divine essence’ to whom we pray and show our gratitude, Such gratitude could not have been possible if it
had not involved the ‘links’ mentioned above and the Holy Spirit inherent in each link.
This Holy Spirit is considered to be the ‘unity of the Father and the Son (Jesus)’.
Thus, the links themselves and the great ‘link’ (the Holy Spirit) have a family aspect, that between ‘father’ and ‘his son’. But such a generational link being masculine cannot exclude a feminine link, which is obvious in the procreation of every family. Patriarchalism in Judaism and Christianity is today being re-evaluated in order to include a certain matriarchalism in the modern era. This movement implies that the family of God in heaven includes women or else it is no family and is simply ‘male culture’. The family aspect of DNA, if it is ‘God’s creation’, must also be represented in the ‘heaven’ towards which human beings are supposedly ‘going’. The church family, which obviously is both male and female, cannot reflect or ‘echo’ a family in heaven which is only masculine in title or essence. The family in heaven, as matriarchalism would probably reassure us, includes mother and father. Thus, in some ‘matriarchalist’- oriented churches, the Virgin Mary – the mother of Jesus – is active in heaven along with the Father and the Son. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have emphasized this more than in Protestant churches, and ‘Mariology’ cannot be ignored in Christian history. Perhaps Mariology represents the Christian belief that (just as happens ‘on earth’ in human families) women are an integral part of the ‘Divine family’ in ‘heaven’ and that to deny this would show a misunderstanding of ‘life in heaven’.
With the advent of post-patriarchal concepts in Church life we can easily propose that the heavenly family of the Trinity includes Mary the mother of Jesus. In any case, even if we stay with traditional Trinitarian theology, the Holy Spirit, as the link between Father and Son, can itself be considered as representing a ‘feminine’ person such as ‘Holy Sophia’ or Holy Wisdom. In this sense, the Holy Wisdom (feminine) created the Son for the Father. But even if we do not use the Sophia concept to represent the feminine, it is evident that heaven is as filled with women as it is with men, and the link between the Holy Spirit in heaven and its working on earth (in the Church) shows us that women are just as much involved as men are.
Perhaps the early Church did not want to see any kind of sexual, family relations in heaven, but if man and women are created ‘in the image of God’ then both must be, like in our earthly DNA, integral elements of the ‘divine world’. To simplify it, we should recognize ‘the Great Mother’ in the Holy Spirit – the one who unites the Father with the Son in heaven and who directs the Spirit’s activity on earth.
As a footnote to this discussion we should remember that in every person’s DNA there are feminine and masculine elements – to such an extent that homosexuals, lesbians, bi-sexuals etc. – all types – can exist in the world as well as heterosexuals. The human genome has mixtures of all varieties of sexual orientation. Thus, it must somehow be true that the interior life of the Holy Trinity also includes all these various types of tendency. We cannot separate the human from the divine to the extent that almighty God created humans only from a masculine or heterosexual aspect of his interior divine life. If that were the case then how could the earthly human families (with various types of ‘sexualities’) ever exist in their present form? God in his/her essence must be multi-sexual. The Christian concept of the Holy Trinity cannot contradict the fact that the masculine and feminine elements are both present in the Book of Genesis (Hebrew/Christian Bible): ‘God created man (‘from the dust of the earth’) and woman (from the ‘rib-bone’ of man) and both were considered necessary for the survival of the human race. In both cases it was from the creating essence of God (dust of the earth, the rib-bone of man) that the human family was created.
When we see how many Christian churches have ordained women priests, ministers and bishops, all inspired by the Holy Spirit in their ministries, we become convinced that heaven is dominated by both female and male elements. But, unfortunately, it took a long span of history for this to be accepted in the Church.
(1) Cf. Kevin J. Mitchell Innate. How the Wiring of our Brains Shapes Who We Are (Princeton University Press) 2018, 293 pp.
Charles Graves
Photograph: ‘rock painting’ in Australia photographed by Graeme Churchard, Bristol (UK)
