Posted on 11/01/2016 4:46:12 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
All five: protestants.
I think that’s pretty much what Mad Dawg said, and when I read it, I said to myself, “Yo, that’s it!” There are times in the Christ church when the human being is not just “being like Christ,” but “being Christ,” and at those key point, the relevant human being has to be a man, because Jesus Christ was a man.
It’s not a question of whether a woman can perform (function X) as well as a man. You can find some woman who can perform most functions as well as or better than some man, and vice versa. The functions that aren’t transferable across the sexes include giving birth to babies (has to be a woman) and offering the Eucharistic sacrifice (has to be a man).
These are all good things to think more deeply about.
I think that the points at which, “It must be a woman,” or, “It must be a man,” give ultimate meaning to our sexual dimorphism.
The one that can’t ever be overcome, in my opinion, is that it must be a man to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice, embodying the human, male, Jesus Christ who is both priest and victim in the sacrament.
It’s possible that technology can override what seem to be fixed facts: that a woman gives birth, that a man’s cells fertilize a woman’s cells, and a new human being results. Plenty of science fiction writers have found alternatives for this.
I don’t think I like where this line of reasoning is going, though, because it implies that manhood, “maleness,” is the One Thing that can’t be changed, while womanhood, “femaleness,” is contingent and dispensible at the discretion of men.
And where else BUT in Scripture do we have the ACTUAL teachings and traditions of the Apostles?
If Jesus wanted women to be Apostles He would have picked the Blessed Mother-perfect in every way.He picked 12 imperfect men and Holy women to follow him.I prefer the Apostles to be less perfect.Makes me feel better.The women were perfect of course.
The Apostles are an example of the transformation the Holy Spirit can accomplish in every believer.
In the Bible, the apostles wrote, stick to our letters and what we said in public in from of many reliable witnesses. If you have some teaching outside of the Bible, I'll need to know the reliable witnesses and the chain of custody. Otherwise, we're talking hearsay.
And Christ said:
(John 16:13)
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.
So the Church herself, Christ's Bride, clinging -- as St. Paul said --- to the traditions handed on to her by the APostles, has within herself that chain of custody.
Now, this just occurred to me. I don't know quite the implications of it. Think: John was the last to write a Gospel and Epistles, near the close of the 1st century, and he impressed his listeners with how MANY of our Blessed Lord's doings and sayings had not been written down:
John 21:25He's also the one who said:
There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.
2 John 1:12:Clearly he's saying his teaching is not confined to what he has written. And he repeats this --- and repeating something is a form of underlining! --- in 3 John 13-14--
Although I have much to write to you, I do not intend to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and to speak face to face so that our joy may be complete.
I have much to write to you, but I do not wish to write with pen and ink. Instead, I hope to see you soon, when we can talk face to face.
Wouldn't you want to know what he had to say?
Wouldn't your investigations be an examination of what the Church was agreed upon about these Apostolic teachings? Wouldn't you be looking for what were areas of unanimity in the earliest Christian writings, Tradition, practice, and doctrine?
This may interest you:
Somebody needs to write a thesis on this.
Contraception was the huge, norm-breaking tectonic rupture resulting in the un-womaning of womanhood.
When women's bodies are split apart conceptually as regards pleasure and fertility (intentionally choosing the pleasuring part while splitting off the fruitful part) --- it begins to make us women, ourselves, into female impersonators.
We look like we're still women, but interiorly we're just a simulacrum, we don't function "as a whole" anymore.
To me the underling weirdness of female impersonators, transwomen, etc. is not that trannies are expected to look and act like women, but that now women are expected to look and act like trannies.
I didn't think of it until later, but this reminds me of the contention of Aristotle (iirc), that every human being is "supposed" to be a man, and women are the result of a defect or error in the process of generation.
Anthony Esolen talked about this in a book I recently read. He mentioned the utter weirdness of the compulsion to make women's bodies more and more like men's.
On that topic, I have a theory that the reason "fat" is the insult many men instantly direct at a woman they dislike is that they instinctively associate it with fertility, and they hate - the word is too weak - the fact that natural sex with natural women makes babies.
(continued)... as, indeed, many of the ancient Greek sources reflect men’s rage at the fact that men cannot have sons without the participation of women.
Wow, everything old is new again!
Genetics, epigenetics, embryology: these were not Aristotle’s strong points.
In bigger news there is no “priesthood” in Christianity.
The rest of Christianity has, and has always had, priests, acting "in persona Christi" with Jesus, our One High Priest.
True.
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