X-Envelope-to: CATHOLIC@american.edu
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.catholic
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 13:10:30 PST
From:         J Scott Berg <ALHY@SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Divinity of Christ...Creation Theology

Liz--

You write:

> Andrew:  I'm at work and don't have my Bible with me, so I can't cite
> specific verses.  Why I believe that God is a He and not She  .....
> many places in the Bible God is referred to as He and I believe when
> the 'Our Father' is being taught to the apostles, it starts with 'Our
> Father.'

While you are certainly correct about what the bible says, I question
your interpretation.  Certainly, Jesus was male.  The reason is his
human nature, which has the characteristic of being either male or
female.  However, God "the Father" has a divine nature only; as such
it is neither male nor female.

Calling God "the Father" is intended to convey a concept of God's
divine nature and/or His attitude toward us to our limited human
minds.  Kind of like sacraments acting as symbols of a deeper reality,
but not exactly. I would not be so brave as to say what that "concept"
might be; it probably conveys different things to different folks
anyhow.  I suspect it is more "parental" than it is "male".  It also
refers to the fact that God is Jesus' Father (Mary is his mother), and
we by adoption (cf Galatians I think) are also "children of God".

Don't get me wrong--"In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the
Sanctifier" makes me cringe much more than your average Catholic, I'm
sure.  Why is hard to describe; I think it has a lot to do with the
fact that the traditional Trinitarian formulation contains some
concepts that come to us as divine revelation, and in some sense we
"shouldn't mess with them."  Some may think that's not a good reason,
but for me it is.

BTW, check everything I ever say.  It's wrong half the time!

A bit of a bio:

  I was on this list before, and then my mail died for two weeks (at
least anything going through uucp), I got bounced, and I've finally
figured out how to get myself back on thanks to cts@dragon.com.
  I'm a fourth year physics graduate student.
  I'm a Roman Catholic, pretty conservative when it comes to Church
issues, particularly when it comes to Church authority.  The reason
for that is that a few years back, any church was as good as any other
as far as I was concerned.  I walked into a Church of Christ, and they
told me that I needed to get baptized again.  Well, that didn't sit
well with me.  They had their way of reading the Bible, and somebody
else had their way of reading the Bible.  What moved me back to the
Catholic Church was that it seemed that the best authority that we had
for the interpretation of scripture and doctrine rested in the
Catholic Church's teaching authority.
  I try to do a lot of reading to try to understand what the Church
teaches.  I'm not sure how well I've done so far, but I keep trying.
  A couple of issues I find interesting:  Ecumenism:  it seems to me
that God's will is that somehow, all these denominations of Christians
will eventually come back together (whatever that means exactly).  To
me, though, doctrinal differences seem to be an almost insurmountable
hurdle.  I'm not sure how to reconcile the two.  Another issue is
Non-violence vs. Just War.  I tend to lean toward a nonviolent reading of
Jesus' teaching and life in the gospels, but Church teaching and
tradition seem to lean more toward Just War.  It seems that we somehow
need to address these two seemingly contradictory views.  Here's one
interesting problem that arises:  say you are living in a country that
is at war.  You don't have much of an opinion one way or another about
whether war (this one or in general) is right or not.  The "default"
position tends to be that you go off and fight in the war.  Should
that be the case?

God bless

                                -Scott Berg

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The opinions expressed here are, of course, my own and nobody else's.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Scott Berg
email: ALHY@slac.stanford.edu
real mail: Varian Physics
           Stanford  CA  94305-4060
phone:  (415) 926-4732 (w)
        (415) 326-2631 (h)
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