Recovering a Gender-inclusive understanding of the Trinity
To resolve our present crisis we need to recover the understanding of Judaism and the early church!
In 2021, Joy Ladin wrote a compelling piece in Sojourners about how “the Bible affirms transgender and nonbinary people.” It was titled [Meeting God Beyond the Gender Binary. Her opening comment can, and should, be seen as a problem statement: “Transgender people have become a flash point in America’s culture wars, particularly in communities and institutions based on religious traditions that see the gender binary—the idea that human beings are always, and only, male or female—as a fixed theological principle rather than a mutable feature of human culture.”
In direct opposition to the hopes for improvement that many might have held then, things have worsened by at least an order of magnitude, and that flash point has exploded in many states. On January 6, LGBTQ Nation reported that the US just completed a “national election that saw $215 million spent attacking the trans community, as well as bans on healthcare for trans people. The question of trans and gender identity has now become one of the central lightning rods for the right-wing conservative movement.
Regardless of the side one is on regarding the subject of transgender people in American society today, we all know that the subject’s high profile and toxicity is a result of the culture wars. Led by fervent evangelicals (closely followed by conservatives in other denominations and additionally by pure political opportunists) who have moved on from abortion as the issue du jour and chosen a new one to create outrage and hate for principally partisan and political purposes. Like it or not, when clergy are calling down the death sentence for homosexual and transgender people, something has gone severely wrong in this so-called “Christian nation.”
However, what has been overlooked, or purposefully set aside for centuries, is not just that the Rabbinic tradition within Judaism does not uniformly see gender as binary, but that the earliest Christians spoke of the Holy Spirit as a feminine figure. The historical fact is that for the first few centuries, through the period when the doctrines of Christology and Pneumatology were being formed, not only was the Holy Spirit understood as the “feminine” aspect of the Godhead, but the Trinity was widely understood as constituting Father, Mother and Son. This understanding dramatically broadens our understanding of the fullness of the Godhead, changes our approach to the interpersonal dynamic therein and radically changes how we perceive the communion of love therein. It goes without saying that had this understanding of the Holy Spirit continued, had it not been transformed into a male figure as patriarchy rose to prominence, the understanding, value and roles of females, intersex and transgender persons would be very different.
The Old Testament and Judaism
Ladin, a poet who taught at Yeshiva University is transgender, and wrote from a Jewish perspective. To summarize her points, we are in relationship to God who created human beings male and female—though this does not exclude God making people in other ways as well; God does not fit into gender categories. In other words, God cannot be understood in terms of human gender.
The male-female gender binary is a function of how one interprets the creation narrative in Genesis 1:26-27. Ladin’s point that “God makes people in other ways as well” needs to be explored because it is very different than the common Judeo-Christian interpretation.
The first human creation narrative reads:
Let us make man (adam) in our image, after our likeness. . . . " And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female (zakar and uneqebah) He created them.
The gender binary interpretation of verse 27 derives from the phrase “male and female He created them.” The adamant gender binary position driving the sexuality part of today’s culture war is based on a literal and polar interpretation of this passage, and there are a host of problems with this approach. These are complex sentences even in translation, and have multiple parts (image, likeness, man, male and female). How do they relate and what do they mean?
There is a second human creation narrative in Genesis chapter 2, and as Rabbi Linda Bertenthal points out, “The fact that Torah begins with juxtaposed contradictory texts frames the entire Torah as something other than literal truth. With no objectively correct reading or literal truth to discover, the reader is forced to choose a reading from which to derive teachings. This choice has moral implications.”
She points out that the language suggest “God’s image is one of plurality within unity” given that the creation after God’s image was plural and begins with a plural decision (let us make…). Additionally, adam describes the human race and is better translated as humankind, while (zakar and uneqebah describe the sexuality and gender of the human creation.
What is meant by image and likeness and how does it relate to male and female in this complex sentence structure? The Judaic interpretation is that the narrative confirms that God has personal existence, and within Reformed Judaism the acknowledgment of some type of plurality within the divine complexity. Both acknowledge that being created in the image and likeness is what bestows personhood on human beings.
Likewise in Christianity it is from these verses that the understanding of personhood within the Godhead and by extension within human beings originates. The understanding of the early Jewish Christians was expanded with the experience of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and unity as communion of love within the Godhead is made apparent. It is a concept one hears little about, but it turns out that historically it was a pivotal concept in the development of Trinitarian doctrine. The first and most important point is that humans were created in the image and likeness of God. Being created male and female is secondary. God then has personal existence, and this personhood is extended to the human part of creation.
From this common starting point derives the interpretations about gender in both Judaism and Christianity. It is easy to fall into the gender binary trap because the words about gender in the common translation are “male and female He created them.” It should be noted that several early rabbis interpret this creation passage as two steps: first the creation of human beings as androgynous, followed by a further action to create male and female sex and gender. In either case, the humans who were created were to be in communion with God and each other.
Rabbi David Meyer has a telling commentary on interpreting this passage, centering on the fact that it is a merism, a figure of speech in which a totality is expressed in two contrasting parts:
For example, “old and young”, as the Prophet Joel foresees: “The old shall dream dreams, and the youth shall see visions.” That is to say: old, young, and everyone in between. Similarly, “near and far,” as in Isaiah’s call: “Greetings of peace to those near and far.” And those in between. So, we learn that God created the human being as “male and female” -- and every combination in between.
He further goes on to explain that Jewish legal tradition identifies no less than six distinct genders, beginning with male and female but also including those we now refer to as intersex. He concludes: “I would suggest, based on the study of these legal texts that the Jewish understanding of gender is neither binary nor even a grid into which every person must be forced to fit. Rather, we see gender diversity as a spectrum, truly a rainbow of possibilities for reflecting the Image of God.”
The range of human gender expression
These are fundamental understandings of the nature of God, and by extension, of the nature of humankind. To the degree that they were current in Judaism during the first centuries of the Christian era, they were also present in the early church. It was to these concepts that new understanding was added as a result of the Incarnation, by those who experienced Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and those later followers who likewise came to believe.
Because we are created as persons in the divine image, we can love and thus be part of that communion of love within the Godhead. Each Person of the Godhead exists to offer Themselves in a community of love with the other Persons. The human call is to recognize that each human being is a "person," created in the image and likeness of God, and to conform to that image to the best of our ability.
Understanding Trinitarianism
It helps to start with a historical overview to assure we understand Trinitarianism. The majority of the early Christians were Jews who came to believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. They were Jews before they became “Christians,” meaning they brought their Jewish understanding of Yahweh (whom Jesus referred to as “my Father”) with them and added to it their belief in Jesus as Messiah.
What that meant doctrinally was that Christology began to develop, and we see the first major manifestation in the contest in the Council of Jerusalem concerning the acceptance of non-Jews, and later in the tension between Peter and Paul about what was necessary for Greeks (pagans) to become Christians. The disputes over Christology peaked with the Arian controversy of the early 4th century that led to the Council of Nicaea and mainly settled the Christology controversy in the Nicene Creed (And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father through Whom all things were made), but said little about the Holy Spirit.
However, as time went by and the faith began to solidify and then as the church struggled to define what were the correct teachings, it became apparent that just adding Christology to the Father of the Old Testament was inadequate. The question then arose about the role of the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology) and how to explain the relationships of what were coming to be understood as the “persons” of the Godhead. Then, following the work of the Cappodacian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus), towards the end of the 4th century, the Council of Constantinople expanded the Nicene Creed by saying about the Holy Spirit: And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, making clear that the persons of the Godhead were co-equal.
The Persons of the Godhead have personal existence, exist within a community of love, all because they exist as three persons. Rooted in the writings of the Church Fathers is this fundamental teaching that humankind is made in the image of God and called to his likeness. Meaning that in Christ, the second Person, God took on human flesh. Humanity is brought into communion with God in the Holy Spirit, the third Person.
Inescapable is that the unity of the Godhead exists as a communion of love. We can’t have one without the other. Thus, our basic framework in understanding the Godhead and our purpose in life must be unity as a communion of love, the fundamental personal relationship with the Holy Trinity.
Most contemporary Christians accept the concept of the Trinity, and will acknowledge the reality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, ask them to explain the relationship, let alone outline the history of the doctrine, and they are lost. It’s one of those things rarely discussed in Sunday School or Bible study. And why should it be? The term doesn’t appear in the Bible. Of course, there are lots of other terms that are part of the Christian faith and doctrine that don’t appear in the Bible either.
The struggle for all Christians in all times, but especially contemporary Christians, is to avoid falling prey to what Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr referred to as "functional unitarianism." While giving lip-service to the doctrine of the Trinity, they tend to settle for one form of unitarianism or another. By that he meant that they emphasize either God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit and ignore or neglect the other two persons of the Trinity.
All too many contemporary Christians are unitarians of the second person of the Trinity (Jesus at the expense of the Father and the Spirit), and that has significant impact on what they believe, how they think, how they operate and what they do. Unitarianism of the second person ends up in the self-limiting personal relationship of the Jesus Movement, while unitarianism of the third person ends up in the equally self-limiting charismatic movement.
Avoiding this trap not only makes one a doctrinally whole Christian, but begins to address the transgender problem in a whole new way. Christology was expanded by Pneumatology and developed into Trinitarianism, and the challenge ahead was to understand and balance the inherent tension of three Persons comprising one Godhead.
What the Trinity means for the Church
The doctrine of the Trinity also broadened and deepened the doctrine of the Church (ecclesiology), expanding it from an organizational understanding to one of communion. Contemporary Greek theologian John Zizoulas, sums it up this way: “Christian ecclesiology was developed on a Christological foundation to which Pneumatology was added later.” He then goes on to explain the implications:
…our Christology is essentially conditioned by Pneumatology, not just secondarily as in the first case; in fact it is constituted pneumatologically. Between the Christtruth and ourselves there is no gap to fill by the means of grace. The Holy Spirit, in making real the Christ event in history, makes real at the same time Christ's personal existence as a body or community. Christ does not exist first as truth and then as communion; He is both at once. All separation between Christology and ecclesiology vanishes in the Spirit.
The central point there is communion: the Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead is based on communion—a communion of love. Another contemporary Greek theologian, Christos Yannaras, puts it this way:
Each person of the Godhead exists to offer Himself in a community of love to the other Persons. Life must function as love in order to be real: if there is no love, then there is no life, just existence.
This understanding of personhood within the Godhead gave rise to the affirmation that God the Holy Trinity is three persons with one essence (three in one). They are unique yet inseparable. We are persons only and because God is "person," that is, because God has "personal existence." In other words, what we are as human beings is a direct reflection or extension of what God is. This, in fact, is what makes personhood possible for human beings. This understanding of the "personal identity" that all people possess is essential for truly understanding who we are as human beings. This personal "divine stamp" applies to all because God created humankind in His image and likeness.
Because God became incarnate (took on human, material form), we have the opportunity as humans to know and experience God. God is beyond our ability to fully comprehend, yet in the mystery of grace we may perceive and experience the truth.
Historic Christianity has always taught what Christ affirmed, that the Father is the source or fountainhead (Greek = arche) of the Godhead. The attributes of the Father are unique to the Father yet inseparable from those of the Son and Spirit. The Son is begotten of the Father, and the attributes of the Son are unique to the Son yet inseparable from those of Father and Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from the Father, and the attributes of the Spirit are inseparable from those of the Father and the Son. Each person (hypostasis) of the Trinity possesses unique attributes that distinguish Him from the Others; yet they exist and find their completeness only within the community of divine persons. That relationship can be illustrated as follows:
Relationship of the Persons of the Trinity
Thus we see that the nature of the Holy Trinity is fundamental and essential to our understanding, because as created in the divine image and likeness, we possess this same nature (essence and person). Furthermore, the relationships within the Holy Trinity are equally critical for us to understand, because they show us how we should relate to ourselves and each other.
Do the Persons of the Godhead have gender?
Let’s begin with what many will consider a radical question: do the Persons of the Godhead have gender? A few contemporary theologians have published significant research on the question of the Holy Spirit as feminine.
One by Johannes van Oort (Radboud University) discusses the main proof texts in the New Testament and Church Fathers, especially in the Jewish Christian and Syrian traditions. Another by Sebastian Brock (University of Oxford) is a deeper semantic assessment of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the Syriac tradition.
Brock sets the stage for us to consider this subject by beginning:
In his Commentary on Isaiah, Jerome quotes from a passage in the Gospel according to the Hebrews where Jesus proclaims that my mother the Holy Spirit has taken me . . . [and conveyed me to Mount Tabor]. “No one should be scandalised on this matter,” comments Jerome, in that ‘Spirit’ is feminine in Hebrew, but masculine in ‘our language’ (Latin) and neuter in Greek, ‘for in the deity there is no gender’ [in divinitate enim nullus est sexus].
Just as Jerome, considered the most learned of the Latin fathers, instructed his audience in the late 4th century, we should not be scandalized or embarrassed to explore this historical reality.
Van Oort begins with a simple and strong statement: “The earliest Christians - all of whom were Jews - spoke of the Holy Spirit as a feminine figure.” These are historical facts to be reckoned with, along with the question of why they were modified or removed and the implications of that change. He begins with Origen’s commentary on The Gospel of the Hebrews where Jesus is quoted as saying, 'My Mother (mētēr), the Holy Spirit, took me just now by one of my hairs and carried me off to the great Mount Tabor' to make the point that not only did Origen accept the concept of the Holy Spirit as Mother, but “sometime in the beginning of the second century CE, the Jewish Christians of this Gospel spoke of the Holy Spirit as Mother.”
He then quotes Jerome on the same passage, confirming that he was “was well acquainted with the old Jewish Christian tradition of the femininity of the Holy Spirit.”
He proceeds to quote Epiphanius and Hippolytus describing the Holy Spirit as female. He then proceeds to The Pseudo-Clementines again making the point about the Jewish Christian concept of the spirit as a feminine Being and further equating the Holy Spirit with Wisdom, and from there “Hence one understands how in early Christian tradition Christ is so often considered to be the child of Mother Sophia or the Holy Spirit.”
Similarly in the Greek Christian authors of the time, Theophilus of Antioch and Ireanaeus of Lyon, the Holy Spirit is spoken of as Wisdom. The references continue through the Pastor of Hermas, Melito of Sardis, The Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Thomas, The Odes of Solomon, the Didascalia, the Apostolic Constitutions, Araphat and Ephrem Syrus and Symeon of Mesopotamia (Makarios).
To look at a few, in the Old Syriac version of the Gospels, John 14:26 reads as follows: … but that Spirit, the Paraclete that my Father will send to you in my name, She shall teach you everything. She shall remind you of all what I say.
Correspondingly, in the Old Syriac version of Romans 8:16, the Apostle Paul says: And She, the Spirit, gives testimony with our spirit that we are children of God.
Finally, in his commentary Fifty Homilies, Makarios states: “She is the kind and heavenly Mother…” As van Oort says, “Repeatedly it is stressed by Makarios that there is no human birth without a mother, and therefore no spiritual birth without the Holy Spirit.” He also notes the influence of these teachings down to the Protestants John Wesley and Nikolaus Zinzendorf.
As we have seen, Brock begins with Jerome to encourage the reader to set aside fear of scandal, then delves into the language and writing of the early Christians.
Although the New Testament was written in Greek, Christianity was born in a Semitic milieu and Jesus himself will have spoken Aramaic (of which Syriac is a dialect). Likewise, in those parts of the eastern Roman Empire where Aramaic, rather than Greek, was both spoken and written (such as much of Syria and Palestine), Aramaic became the language of many early Christian communities; accordingly, when these communities spoke of the Holy Spirit they naturally used the standard Aramaic word for ‘spirit’, ruha (also ‘wind’ as pneuma), which, like Hebrew ruah, is grammatically feminine. Thus, when referring to the Holy Spirit, they used the feminine forms of adjectives, verbs, etc.
He then challenges us not to react with surprise when “we hear the Holy Spirit described as ‘she’ which would have also been felt in a language where the word for ‘spirit’ is feminine anyway.”
Brock is focusing on early Syriac literature and points out that “up to about AD 400 the Holy Spirit is virtually always treated grammatically as feminine.” A change occurs in the early fifth century and “it is evident that some people began to disapprove of treating the Holy Spirit as grammatically feminine; accordingly, in defiance of the grammatical rules of the language, they treated the word ruha as masculine wherever it referred to the Holy Spirit.” Finally, “From the sixth century onwards what had been only sporadic practice in the fifth century now becomes the norm, ruha, referring to the Holy Spirit, is regularly treated as masculine.”
These same changes can be seen in Old Syriac translations of the Gospels:
In the revised translation of the Syriac New Testament, known as the Peshitta, and produced in the early fifth century, we find that although the feminine has been preserved in many places, there are also some where the gender has been altered to masculine. Finally, in the early seventh-century version known as the Harklean (a masterpiece of mirror translation) ruha is regularly treated as masculine wherever it refers to the Holy Spirit.
It is important to understand that there is more going on here than a change in the gender of words due to translation over time. These early Christian theologians were intelligent and also capable linguists. It’s inconceivable that they couldn’t convey the gender of a Person of the Trinity if they chose to. The question then, needs to be answered: why did ruah (feminine) in the Old Testament become masculine in the canonical New Testament?
When doctrine is manifest in liturgical practice (i.e. the worship of the church) we can be assured that it reflects wide-spread acceptance because it is part of faith and practice. Brock points out that in the Gospel of Philip there are invocational prayers in baptismal and eucharistic contexts referring to the Holy Spirit as Mother, the most specific being: We hymn you (Christ) and your unseen Father and your Holy Spirit the Mother of all created things.
Even though Brock concluded that, “In these passages we have clear evidence of a Trinity envisaged as consisting of Father, Mother and Son,” he also makes clear the change in practice that is taking place when he states: “The fifth century is clearly the period of transition… but my general impression is that it is those writers who are more theologically aware… of contemporary controversies… who are more likely to employ the masculine.”
We can clearly see then, that for at least the first few centuries, and at least in much of the eastern Church and some of the western Church, the understanding of the Holy Spirit as feminine persisted. We can illustrate that dynamic with the Persons of the Trinity and their shared unity as a community of love as follows:
Gender aspects of the Holy Trinity
Brock’s survey leads to his conclusion, which begins with the observation that the use of the feminine gender by these early Christian theologians simply followed the lead set in the biblical writings themselves, “where such imagery applied to God is by no means infrequent - even though traditionally male-oriented eyes have usually been blind to this.”
He concludes with this statement: “Clearly it is important to recover an awareness of, and a sensitivity to, this female imagery already present in the tradition, for it is only by regaining this sensitivity that it is possible to attain to a better appreciation of the fullness of the Godhead: by restricting ourselves to only fatherly images (or only motherly images), we will end up with a very unbalanced view of God.”
The loss of the feminine: Church and Empire
We can see in the work of Brock and van Oort not just how common was the usage, but also clearly that by the sixth century the understanding of the Holy Spirit as feminine had been lost and transformed into the male gender. The timeline of transition more or less corresponds to other major changes in doctrine and practice with the church and empire. This process and the periods in which they occurred are important to understand as we begin to explore the implications of these doctrines and how they relate to our contemporary gender problems.
Under Constantine, Christianity had become legal. Over time it became the principal faith of the Roman Empire (then later the Eastern and Western Roman Empires) leading to it becoming a type of theocracy in which the emperor was understood as the representative of God on earth working closely with the church, and that his earthly kingdom was to be an imitation of God’s holy realm. Thus, it was a necessary benefit to the state and the emperor to settle major religious controversies. We see this in how many major church councils were convened by emperors to settle specific doctrinal controversies (Nicaea, etc.), as well as councils for formally establishing the canon of the Bible (Carthage). It is evident even today in the statement of faith known as the Hymn of Justinian (emperor from 527-565), still central to the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Conflicts over doctrine, especially Christological doctrine, often arose in specific regions under the oversight of one or more bishops. If the bishops could not resolve them, and especially if they escalated and led to civic unrest, the government of the Empire became involved for obvious reasons. In terms of the church, this meant that often initiatives to resolve conflicts, whether theological or civic, were initiated by the Emperor or his delegates, and explains why they convened many of the councils. Civic stability within the Empire was paramount, especially in times when threats from without were frequent.
This process is often referred to as consolidation, and over time another dynamic began to occur: what was standard practice in the capitals, Rome or Byzantium, became standard practice across the Empire. We can see this in areas that would appear to be as far afield as liturgical practice and liturgical music. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 not only put forth an expanded Creed addressing the person of the Holy Spirit, but formalized that the Bishop (Patriarch) of Constantinople had primacy in the East and the Bishop (Pope) of Rome had primacy in the West. The church offices were being organized along geographic lines that were aligned with the imperial government and were male dominated.
Few people understand that in the early church there were not only multiple liturgical rites, but there were also multiple forms of liturgical music. The ancient western rites included: the Roman Rite, the Ambrosian Rite, the Aquileian Rite, the Rite of Braga, the Durham Rite, the Gallican Rite, the Mozarabic Rite, the Celtic Rite, the Sarum Rite, and multiple Catholic Order Rites. Many of these rites had their own form of liturgical music, some of which is extant today such as Early Roman, Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Milanese, Beneventan and Gallican. Today these are almost exclusively heard in performance halls rather than in the liturgical celebration of mass, because after the elaboration of Early Roman chant into Gregorian Chant, and the standardization of Gregorian Chant in the capital and other major cities, the pressure to conform to those practices was significant enough they fell out of practice.
Similar dynamics occurred in the Eastern Empire that had two ancient liturgical traditions from which all of the other Eastern Rites developed, the Alexandrian Rite in Egypt and the Antiochian Rite in Syria. Following the establishment of Constantinople as capital of the Eastern Empire, the Rite of Constantinople developed from the Antiochene Rite. With the elevation of Constantinople to the Patriarchate of the Eastern empire, it replaced that of Antioch in eminence and influence. From this resulted the standardization of liturgical practice and music in the east, ultimately resulting in the dominance of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and of what we now call Byzantine Chant. The exception being the so-called Oriental Churches.
In the Eastern Church this expanded as the missionary efforts to the Slavs under Cyril and Methodius created a written language (Slavonic) which over time led to the use of the Russian language rather than Greek liturgically, and the development of Russian liturgical music.
Under the rubric of this consolidation and standardization, many doctrines and traditions were established, but many were subsumed and others replaced and lost. Among them, as patriarchy came to dominate, was the Offices of Widows and Deaconesses,
Widows, Deacons and Deaconesses
Most Christians are familiar with the term Deacon, even if the role varies widely from the liturgical churches where deacons are co-celebrants with the priest during worship to the more Protestant model of functioning as elders who assist the minister by providing spiritual oversight and pastoral care. However, in the early church there also existed an Order of Widows and an Order of Deaconesses that paralleled the male Order of Deacons.
As Cathleen Kaveny, a Christian bioethicist explains, “in the patriarchal, patrilineal world of the ancient Near East, a woman whose husband died was still considered to be part of her husband’s family. After her husband’s death, her support became the obligation of her sons. If she was of childbearing age and had no sons, her father-in-law was expected to arrange a levirate marriage for her. A woman who has lost her husband, who cannot remarry, and who has no sons to provide for her care, is in a precarious position.” In other words, they were once-married women who had no means of support. This not only created a real need to care for and minister to widows in the church, but also lead to the creation of an order of those to do so.
Kaveny continues, “The Order of Widows can trace its biblical roots to 1 Timothy, where its qualifications for membership are listed alongside the qualifications for the ecclesiastical offices of bishop, deacon and elder. The primary duty of the Order of Widows was to pray ceaselessly on behalf of the community; their pleas are powerful because God hears the cries of the oppressed. Although theirs was not a ministry of the altar, they exercised spiritual authority and influence in their ministry to the community. Widows made house visitations, where they comforted, fasted, and prayed with the sick and gave practical instruction to younger women. They prophesied. Enrolled widows also assumed a place of honor in the liturgy, sitting in the front of the assembly along with the bishops, priests, and deacons.”
The Order of Widows declined in importance and during the 4th century it’s role and functions were assumed over time by Deaconesses. The term deacon (diakonos) is simply the Greek word for a servant and in the early Church the deacon’s first role was that described in Acts 6: distributing food to the poor, leaving the apostles free to devote themselves “to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4).
In the 3rd century Syrian book or church order, the Didaskalia, the duties of the Deaconesses included, visiting women in their homes and assisting in baptisms of women. Additionally, in the Apostolic Constitutions besides keeping order in the church, the role described is further expanded following baptism of women to teaching and instruction and it states, “the ministry of a woman deacon is especially needful and important.”
The Didaskalia directs the faithful to esteem the bishop as they would God, the presbyters as the apostles, the deacons as Christ and the deaconesses as the Holy Spirit. According to this same document, deaconesses were ordained by the bishop in a rite similar to but not identical with the ordination of deacons. So what we are left with is the historical fact that there were two formal orders of women in ministry, over time the role of one was taken over by the other. However, it was formal enough ministry that deaconesses were “ordained” by their bishop.
Requirements for ordination into the order of deaconesses can be found in the proceedings of various church councils and archaeological evidence on tombstones as late as the 11th century.
When exactly the order of deaconesses was laid aside is not certain, but while lingering as late as the 11th century in the Eastern Church and the 9th or 10th century in the Western Church, though there are still ordained deaconesses in the Maronite Church today. The loss of this order took place over a longer span than the liturgical standardization, but the net of all this consolidation was not just the end of an active ministerial role for women, but their relegation to a lesser position in the church and a further loss of the understanding of the feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit.
Was the Early Church Gender Binary?
We have seen that not only were humans created as male and female, but in the image and likeness of the Godhead. By extension then, human sexuality is a necessary element in being human and created in the image of God. This is not to say that there is sexuality within the Godhead, but to acknowledge that the gender within the Godhead, as understood by the early church, manifests itself physically in the gendered creation of human beings.
The male and female created genders, then, are intended to live a union of being—with each other and with God. Specifically, a communion of love as we see exemplified between the Persons of the Godhead. Though Jewish and the surrounding Greek and Roman societies were patriarchal, not only was there a clearly defined understanding of intersex persons therein, there was a period of a few centuries during which the Christian church possessed a different understanding of gender within the Godhead that resulted in broader understanding of gender manifest in the role of women.
Among the pivotal references to this is the statement of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians (3:28): There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Paul was among the Jewish Christians, a Rabbi who converted after his Damascus road experience. While he also can be quoted discussing the roles that women were to perform in the church, his statement to the Galatians is incredibly high minded and certainly doesn’t relegate women or the female gender to a second class or subservient role.
For a time in the history of Christianity, women, while excluded from the higher ordained clerical offices, were not understood as man’s possession (chattel) or instrument, but rather as persons in their own right, a sharer of the nature of God, a necessary complement to man. Within the larger category of male and female gender is the goal of humans existing together in perfect communion and harmony for the fulfillment of human nature and life.
Given the extent of the influence of Judaism in much of the early Christian church’s understanding of gender—that the Holy Spirit was feminine and a maternal figure, it is fair to ask to what degree Judaism’s understanding about intersex and transgender people was also circulating and accepted within the Christian church.
In a 2007 essay Rabbis Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman point out that “By the third century of the Common Era, a substantial section of Jewish civil and sacred law had been written that was dedicated to the question of how to integrate intersex people into the gendered society of Jewish Antiquity… intersex people are to be protected from physical harm and their lives sanctified, just like any other person. This chapter of the Mishnah is just one of many texts. The tumtum and androgynos (two intersex labels applied by the Sages) appear over 300 times in the Babylonian Talmud alone!”
This is the same time period during which the Holy Spirit was understood as female and/or Mother within major Christian circles. Kukla and Zellman’s point is that the Rabbis of the early Christian era acknowledged the presence of intersex people within a patriarchal and binary culture: “They certainly do not advocate the overthrow of binary systems; they do not argue for sex and gender liberation, as some of us might wish that they had. But they also never question whether intersex people really exist, or whether these conditions were better eradicated.” As mentioned previously, those we now call transgender are mentioned positively in the Kaballah, the Jewish book of mystical teachings. In other words, while outside the gender majority, intersex and transgender people were acknowledged, and accepted as part of God’s creation and integrated into society.
Where to now St. Peter?
Which brings us back to the matter of being part of Christ's Body, the Church, which means sharing a unity of being. That, in turn, means the Church must manifest a unity of action that is in keeping with the divine vision. Unfortunately, the church conformed to a variety of cultural and social dynamics, not the least of which was the patriarchy of the Empire in which it existed. The consolidation of all these dynamics over time made men ascendant over women, and not only was the role of women returned to second class citizen, but the understanding of gender also changed. The equivalence inherent in human gender as an expression of the gender within the Godhead was lost.
Christian churches, communities and organizations are to be characterized by unity as a communion of love. Conformity to the image and likeness calls us to be in communion with one another and God’s creation around us. We must love and respect our neighbor. We should not isolate ourselves from those around us. Harboring anger and animosity breaks our communion with our fellow human beings. This is especially true of those within our own communities.
Whether or not one accepts these doctrines of the Holy Spirit that were part of the early Church, the fact is that these doctrines were present. Further, they were held by theologians and eminent writers who were neither deluded nor heretics. That should give us pause and at a bare minimum force a reconsideration of the literal gender binary upon which so much of the current culture wars is based.
Joy Ladin; Meeting God Beyond the Gender Binary. Sojourners, 2021. Link
Linda Berthenthal; Understanding Genesis 1:26-27. 2004 Link
David J. Meyer; What the Torah Teaches Us About Gender Fluidity and Transgender Justice. 2018 Link
Cathleen Kaveny; The Order of Widows: What the Early Church Can Teach Us About Older Women and Health Care. 2006 Link
Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman; Created by the Hand of Heaven: A Jewish Approach to Intersexuality. 2007 Link
Sebastian Brock; The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature. 2016 Link
Johannes van Oort; The Holy Spirit as Feminine: Early Christian Testimonies and their Interpretation. 2016 Link
John Zizoulas; Being As Communion. St. Vladimir’s Press, 1997
Christos Yannaras; Elements of Faith. St. Vladimir’s Press, 1997
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