So father asked about pope Francis picking up the phone, so I I thought I'd actually start.
I'm gonna be both reading bits of the paper and doing slides, so multitasking, it's a challenge.
So please, be, be patient with me.
But so to tell you the story of, my appointment to the synod, since father asked.
I don't know how I knew he was going to ask, but, I guess I did.
It was the summer of twenty fifteen, and I just finished preparing my classes for the fall and went down to, our campus at Catholic University.
And in my faculty mailbox was a large bulky white envelope, which I pulled out and found it was from the Holy See.
I opened it and on the top of the packet letter from that man, cardinal Lorenzo Baldessari, the secretary of the Synod of Bishops, which told me that you have been appointed as an expert auditor for the twenty fifteen Synod of Bishops, from the October seventh through twenty eighth.
And it went on in the last line of the first paragraph said, the holy father thanks you for accepting this invitation.
At that point, my first thought was I thought it was a different group headquartered in Italy that made offers that couldn't be refused.
First thought's not always the best.
My second thought was, oh my goodness, what am I gonna do with my classes for three weeks?
My third thought was, I'm going to Rome.
And by the time a couple months rolled around a bit later, I was actually kind of excited about the prospect.
So the last words that I texted to my wife Claire and my children before taking off for Europe, were the words of Martin Freeman as Bilbo running down the lane of the Shire, I'm going on an adventure.
And it was.
It was a chance to see the church up close, the leadership of the church praying, discerning, working together period of time.
That view is the general one of the general assembly sessions.
You're looking down basically from where I sat.
The holy father was with us most of the time.
At least when we were in the general assembly, when we were in our small groups, he he wasn't with us.
But, the little circular minorities that one bishop said to me should be translated minor circuses, but that's that's another conversation.
One of the issues that came up, it was certainly on a lot of the bishops radar at the synod was the issue of what, some people call gender ideology.
Recent recent magisterial teaching has drawn attention to the challenges posed for Christian faith by that ideology.
For the sake of initial description, what do I mean by that?
It can be described as the view that gender should be somehow understood as socially or personally constructed, meaning of sexual difference as opposed to sex, which is the biological largely minimal difference between men and women.
There's been a lot of statements and I'll I'll mention very quickly a couple of them, from the church, drawing our attention to this challenge.
But it raises the question, at least for me, does the church also give us a more positive account of how we can address a culture in which the number of genders on Facebook is over 70, at this at this point?
Maybe higher.
I'd I'm not on Facebook, but that's what I understand.
At first glance, the language of complementarity might seem to be kind of an unlikely candidate to help because it's been criticized from a whole host of quarters, as inadequate to a task like this.
It's been rejected for denoting a faulty view of the human person in which individuals are seen as incomplete apart from the opposite sex.
Feminist thinkers have criticized it as a kind of code for ongoing gender apartheid on the part of the church.
Separate but equal in theory means separate and unequal in practice.
Others have complained that the sexual binary which it implies fails scientifically and theologically in light of the actual diversity of sexual makeup and behavior of the human and animal world.
These thinkers, some of whom identify as members of the LGBTQ community, instead see a rainbow of diverse sexual colors shining through male, female, intersex, transgender, transsexual, and gay people in the way they embody and live out their sexual makeup.
Some Catholic authors have actually argued that the meaning of the term complementarity employed by the Magisterium should be revised to include some of these diverse forms of human sexuality, taking into account things like sexual orientation complementarity and not simply, they say, reproductive tech complementarity.
Finally, some scholars have criticized the term as kind of a late arrival on the scene to magisterial teaching basically being coined by Saint John Paul the second.
A response to all of those objections is beyond the scope of what I can do here.
Furthermore, a lot of them have been effectively dealt with by others.
Sister Prudence Allen in her historical research on the concept of women, men in western tradition has, shown that what she calls integral sex complementarity overcomes the concerns about human beings being seen as fractional beings or being a shield for ongoing equality that some feminist thinkers worry about.
The work of Joan Roughgarten in evolutionary biology, which attempts to paint sex in the natural world, evolutionary biology which attempts to paint sex in the natural world in the hues of the LGBTQ rainbow and replaced Darwinian sex selection with what she calls social selection.
It's been appropriated by a few theologians, but it's been heavily criticized by many other people on scientific, philosophical, and theological grounds.
The proposal by Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler to add sexual orientation complementarity to the language used by the church, adopts an orientation essentialism not well supported by science, collapses personal identity into desires, ignores Christian moral freedom, and yields doctrinal conclusions at odds with Catholic teaching, as the USCCB's doctrine committee pointed out.
It's the last objection to complementarity that I'm going to focus on here.
The idea that it's a relatively recent concept introduced to the church's vocabulary kind of being made up of whole cloth in magisterial teaching particularly by Pope John Paul the second to kind of retrench traditional ideas about the sexes in the face of new twenty and twenty first century questions.
Contrary to that, I'm going to argue that the creation accounts of Genesis actually provide a biblical foundation for the equality and complementarity of men and women, and that this language can therefore frame a positive response to the challenges of our own day.
The what I'm gonna do is first, briefly mention, because these are probably familiar to you, some recent statements by the church on gender equality, gender ideology.
Going to note briefly that the language of sexual complementarity predates the pontificate of John Paul the second.
It's not a John Paul the second term.
But then I'm gonna spend most of my time looking at the roots of complementarity in the actual text of the creation accounts of Genesis.
If time allows, I'll offer you a few final thoughts about the relationship between language and doctrine in history and the way those work together.
So we have a series of recent statements from the church.
This from the Pontifical Council for the Family on Marriage and de facto unions, warning us about some of the dangers of of gender ideology.
Again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because of constraints of time among other things.
If you are not aware of this statement, I really would encourage you to take a look.
This is this is, in my mind, the most profound diagnosis of how we got to our point as a cult this as a culture.
It's the final Christmas address of Pope Benedict the sixteenth to the Roman Curia.
You can see, by the way, that I failed PowerPoint school because you're not supposed to put a lot on slides.
I routinely ignore that, especially with long, really important quotes like this one.
But citing Gilles Bernheim, the chief, rabbi of France, pope Benedict traces our much of the roots of our gender confusion to, the work of existentialist feminist writers like Simone de Beauvoir.
Her idea that one is not born a woman, one becomes so.
These words, he said, lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term gender as a new philosophy of sexuality.
According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of.
It's a social role we choose for ourselves while in the past it was chosen for us by society.
And the other thing I would point out to and it's too much here to to cite fully, Benedict Pope Benedict does point us back to Genesis by way of contrast.
Again, it's it's it's profound in only the way that Pope Benedict, can be profound.
So, if you have not seen this statement, it's it's certainly worth seeing.
The other, recent statement I would draw your attention to is, from a text of Pope Francis, his apostolic exhortation on the family of Morris Letizia.
In section 56, he echoing some of his predecessors concerns, he makes a further and I think very helpful, distinction.
He says so I'm at the end of this quote again, another failed, failure from PowerPoint school.
Pope Benedict says, it needs to be emphasized that biological sex and the socio cultural role of sex that is gender can be distinguished but not separated.
That's a very helpful statement.
We can distinguish the way we're socialized into understanding our maleness and femaleness and as opposed to the the biological reality.
But when we separate those completely, as Pope Benedict said, we basically dissolve the very concept of human nature and our own status as creatures.
Let me say a word about the roots of this idea of complementarity.
The the notion that complementarity was invented by Pope John Paul the second is not accurate.
That's also a statement made by, Michael Lawler and Todd Salzman in some of their work.
It's true that the term or some or some equivalent of it appears only in Catholic thought and magisterial teaching in the twentieth century.
It's also true that the Polish pope gave one of the most developed articulations of the idea over the course of his pontificate.
But his articulation had ecclesial and philosophical precursors.
One can find the term itself complementarity or equivalent usages to it in speeches of Pius the twelfth, Saint John the twenty third, the documents of the second Vatican council, and blessed pope Paul the sixth, who will be, it looks like, Saint Pope Paul the sixth by the end of this year, all prior to the usage of John Paul the second.
Philosophically, the term emerged in the phenomenological personalism of the twentieth century.
Catholic converts, who were also students of Edmund Husserl, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Edith Stein, both employed and articulated what can only be called an account of sexual complementarity.
In his groundbreaking treatment of love in his work on marriage, Daia, in 1929, Von Hildebrand stated quote, it would be incredibly superficial to consider as mere biological difference the distinction between man and woman, which really shows us two complimentary types of the human species.
Edith Stein used a had a very similar concept using domestic categories and language.
She wrote, the insistence that sexual differences are stipulated by the body alone is questionable from various points of view.
If anima equals form a corpus, then bodily sexual differentiation constitutes an index of differentiation in spirit.
Second, matter serves form, not the reverse.
That strongly suggests that the differences in the in the psyche is the primary one, unquote.
So that's Edith Stein.
Those ideas would be developed further in the long and very fruitful pontificate of Saint John Paul the second.
The Polish pope referred to complementarity numerous times in his teaching ministry, in the catechesis that we've come to know as the theology of the body, reflecting on the creation accounts of Genesis.
He emphasized the basic unity and difference of the sexes reflected in their bodies.
Quote, he wrote, their unity denotes above all the identity of human nature.
Duality on the other hand shows what on the basis of this identity constitutes the masculinity and femininity of created man, unquote.
So male and female are two distinct personal expressions of a common human nature.
These distinct forms of personal existence are expressed through the two distinctive forms of human embodiment.
He wrote, quote, masculinity and femininity express the two fold aspect of man's somatic constitution and indicate the new consciousness of the meaning of the body, a reciprocal enrichment, unquote.
Complementarity, he would further write, pertains to the very existence and self awareness of the person.
Quote, the knowledge of man passes through masculinity and femininity, which as it were, two are two incarnations of the same metaphysical solitude before God and the world.
Two reciprocally completing ways of being a body and at the same time of being human.
As two complementary dimensions of self knowledge and self determination.
At the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body.
So for John Paul the second, if the body expresses the person and there are two fundamental forms of human embodiment, then there are two fundamental ways of existing as a person.
Men and women have their own originality, their own unique way of existing as persons.
His mature position would oops.
I'm behind on my slides.
That's the that's the longer quote.
By the way, that man and woman here is the the translation of the Theology of the Body, Katechesis by Mikhail Walstein in 2006, which is the better translation.
The older English translations use the L'Zervato Romano edition.
So you have text translated by newspaper staff over five years, which is why you have the same Italian word translated three or four different ways.
So use Volstein if you're gonna do serious study of the theology of the body.
His mature position would extend complementarity to every dimension of the human person.
Womanhood and manhood, he wrote, are complementary.
Not only from the physical and psychological points of view, but from the ontological.
So men and women are distinct in their very being, in the act of personal existence.
The Vatican's position paper for the nineteen ninety five Beijing conference on women differentiated that reality further speaking of biological, individual, personal, and spiritual complementarity.
So clearly, John Paul the second has a robust, very highly developed, very rich understanding of the complementary differences between the sexes.
The way in which they are two unique expressions of a common nature of humanity.
But is he just picking up fragments from previous ecclesial statements from the phenomenological personalism which he himself studied, when he worked on Edmund Husserl's thought, if and studied the work of Max Scherr, another Husserl student?
Or can this idea be traced back further?
In particular, does complementarity have a biblical reference, a biblical foundation?
Or is it simply a modern idea that the church developed and employed to do to engage a particularly modern set of questions?
Again, I'm going to argue that the idea of complementarity, while not named as such in scripture, can be located in the teaching of the creation accounts of Genesis.
So I'm gonna say a little bit about the two accounts of creation drawing on biblical scholarship, drawing a bit more on the teaching of Saint John Paul the second, but looking primarily at the text itself.
So the first will take them in the canonical order, even though the first creation account as it occurs in the text, most scholars think is the newer of the two.
While generalizations about consensus in modern biblical scholarship are fraught with peril.
That's an understatement.
You can just underline that.
There's much agreement in the literature that the opening chapters of Genesis contain not one but two accounts of the creation of the world and humanity.
The first, a newer, usually called the priestly or p account, is comprised of the first chapter and the opening verses of chapter two.
The over and second account often designated the yahwist because of its use of God's proper name, is made up of the rest of the second chapter and the story of human sin in chapter three.
These two accounts were juxtaposed by a redactor who was responsible for the final shape of the text and the way in which the two accounts stand in relation to one another.
The first account is a poetic and theological statement regarding God's creative activity and not a narrative per se.
Though the literary device of seven days which structure the text give it something of the feel of a narrative.
The text emphasizes the order and wisdom with which God creates the visible world and the transcendent nature of his creative activity.
The creation of humanity occurs on the penultimate or sixth day of creation and in many ways is the climax of the story.
A somewhat literal translation of the relevant verses which I have here on the slide can be rendered as follows.
So I'm gonna translate again a little bit more literally than most English translations do.
And Elohim said, let us make Adam in our image as our likeness that they may rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the tamed beasts, and all the earth, and all the creeping things of the earth.
And Elohim created the Adam in his image.
In the image of Elohim, he created him or it.
The Hebrew pronoun can be rendered either way.
Male and female, he created them.
And Elohim blessed them.
And Elohim said to them, be fruitful, be many, and fill the earth, and subjugate it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the heavens, and all the living things that creep up creeping on the earth.
Of particular importance for my purposes here, I'm gonna emphasize four things.
One, the semantic range of the term adam in the text.
Second, the meaning of the term image in the original Hebrew and its relevance for understanding the dignity of humankind in general.
Third, the specific application of this understanding to male Hebrew zakar and female Hebrew nekeba.
And four, the blessing of fertility.
So that's what I'm gonna try to highlight in this text.
So first, the Hebrew word adam usually rendered as man, human, or humankind in our modern English translations.
The first use of this term in this text should be understood in the sense of the older inclusive English usage, man meaning mankind.
In other words, corresponding to homo not we're in classical Latin, but still as a singular entity.
Yet the text also indicates a collective sense of the term in so far as adam is comprised of both male and female.
The second story of creation which takes the form of a narrative adds to this semantic range by using the term Adam to describe an individual character that is the man, and you can look at Genesis two seven, who is later given the name Adam.
So to conflate the teaching of the two accounts just for a moment to highlight that semantic range, we could say that God creates man, humankind, as male and female and the first man, individual human, comes to be called man.
So you you get the idea.
Adam is being used in a a a variety of ways.
So Adam is used in both a singular and a collective sense.
In this latter regard, it can be described as a form of corporate personality, not uncommon in biblical thought, in which the whole is understood to be summed up or contained in the individual.
An idea that's gonna feature in the New Testament and Saint Paul's Christology as well.
Second point, there's a wealth of biblical commentary and philosophical theological reflection on the concept of the Imago Dei, which is the cornerstone in Judeo Christian conceptions of human dignity.
Within the horizon of the text, the meaning of the Hebrew word selem, image, is specified by the two fold command to exercise dominion within creation, verses twenty six and twenty eight.
It does not indicate physical resemblance.
Instead, humanity represents God in something of his divine authority within creation.
Adam is God's royal representative or steward within the visible world.
But as God uses his own authority to care for and sustain creation, so his human representatives are called to exercise their stewardship in similar fashion.
Stewardship is neither untrammeled license nor military power.
Dominion is not domination.
But there is a second meaning of image, selem, embedded in the structure of the text.
The twofold directive to have dominion in twenty six and twenty eight form an inclusio, highlighting verse 27 which falls in between them.
This serves to bring into focus a second dimension of the idea of image, the idea of relationality.
This is indicated first in the text by the duality of male and female.
The Hebrew terms kar and nikaba denote the concrete physical differences between the sexes which make them capable of receiving the blessing of fertility in verse verse 28.
The relationality of male and female is the basis of human community.
But the more theologically basic form of relationality to which the text points us is indicated by the next day of creation.
The relationship between humanity and its creator encapsulated in the worship of the seventh day, the Sabbath day.
Throughout scripture, six is used as a number associated with incompletion, imperfection, and human beings apart from God.
While the number seven often denotes perfection, completion, and is at times associated with God himself.
Though all of the parts of creation are present by the end of the sixth day, all the pieces are there, creation remains fundamentally and radically incomplete.
It is completed by God's rest in which he contemplates and appreciates that which he has called into existence.
The way in which humans enter into this divine activity of rest, which gives life and wholeness to creation is through worship.
Created with the beasts on the sixth day, humanity is created for the worship of the seventh day.
When Adam fails to do this, he or they revert to his or their origin and become in truth bestial.
Look at the story of king Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel four twenty five to 34.
It is an encapsulation of this teaching of the first account of creation.
Constraints of time, prevent us from looking at it here.
The vocation of Adam as created by God is not only to be his stewards but also priests of the created world, speaking the praises of God on behalf of what he has made.
So human beings represent God to creation and represent creation to its creator in giving praise and worship to who made it.
Read within its historical the historical context of the ancient world, excuse me, one of the most stunning aspects of the teaching of the first account of creation is the attribution of this dual vocation of royal representation and priesthood to women as well as men.
Rather than being at the bottom of the cosmic hierarchy in the universe as in the Babylonian creation myth of the Enuma Elish, where human beings are are created from the blood of a god slain in cosmic warfare to do the menial tasks in the god in the universe which the gods do not do not want to do, namely to clean up the gods' mess and to feed them through animal sacrifice.
Adam as male and female is the pinnacle of creation, as god's royal representatives called to relate directly to god in worship.
The attribution of the image of god to both sexes provides a theological foundation to the equal dignity of women and men in a world where this reality was neither understood nor expressed.
Any biblically derived understanding of sexual complementarity has to deal with this foundational principle.
The sacred text also points us toward the fact that there is something in the relation of men and women in their very concrete physicality that images God.
Francis Martin puts it well.
In this light, he writes, we can appreciate that sexual difference is the bodily symbolic expression of the relational nature of human beings.
Pease and the priestly author's insistence of joining the two notions of image and male and female must have a reason.
The human being, the totality with a particular stamp of male and female is relational at every level of existence.
Adam images God, that is makes his power and authority present and interacts with God in the relating of men and women.
So something about the relationship of the sexes themselves participates in this in the image of God.
In the reciprocity of male and female, what the later theology would call their communion with each other.
We have the basis for human community.
That is made explicit in the text with the blessing of fertility articulated in verse 28.
Genesis one twenty eight draws together the two basic meanings of image that I've identified, dominion and the relationality of male and female.
God blesses the pair.
The Hebrew word for this blessing, barak, as used in this account, indicates something that becomes life giving within creation.
Hence, sea creatures and birds in Genesis one twenty two, later the Sabbath in Genesis two three, and here the union of male and female is so blessed and becomes a source of life within the created world.
One way in which men and women exercise their dominion within the created world is by coming together to generate new human life in the image of God.
They therefore share in God's own creative activity.
As Saint John Paul the second would put it, procreation is quote, a renewal of the mystery of creation, unquote.
The Hebrew scriptures are careful never to project sexuality and sexual reproduction onto God, unlike many of the gods of the ancient Near East.
Sexual differentiation and reproduction are a gift of God to his creatures with which reflect his own creative activity even while being different from it.
The blessing is not constitutive of the image of God in Adam, but follows on it.
To summarize some of what we've pulled out of this text, the text underscores the dignity of both sexes made in the image of God and so far as both are depicted as priest stewards of God's creation.
The same time the account makes clear that Adam is only complete as male and female.
In a fundamental way, the sexes are oriented toward one another and stand in relation to one another as well as their to their creator in God's design.
Their complementary difference is the basis of all human community, most obviously in the exercise of their shared fertility.
The second account, believed by most or many scholars at least to be some centuries older than the one that precedes it in the current canonical form of the text, Like the first account, much of the imagery of the text is symbolic, but unlike the first account, this account does take the form of a narrative and the order of creation unfolds differently than the first.
One of the key differences is in the first account, the creation of man and woman in the image of God is described simultaneously.
While in this account, Adam is created first, but his solitude is problematized in the narrative.
After the repeated insistence in the first account of creation that everything God made was good or very good, the declaration in Genesis two eighteen of God that it is not good for Adam to be alone is jarring.
Presumably, whoever did the final redaction of these texts saw what appeared to be a sharp contradiction and left it because of the importance of what it signals and introduces.
Adam here denotes a singular individual rather than the collective or corporate personality of the first account.
Equally striking is the solution that God proposes to the solitude of Adam.
I will make him a helper who matches him.
The Hebrew word is literally translated helper, But as scholars have noted, it does not carry connotations of being less than, as it can in our modern English idiom.
In fact, the term is used in the Psalms to describe God as the help or helper of Israel.
Obviously, God is not less than the people whom he has called and formed.
Likewise, woman who will be the realization of God's proposed solution for the solitude of Adam is in no way less than the man.
She is the divinely given help to Adam to realize God's plan.
To this idea of the fundamental equality of the sexes, the modifying adjective, kenegdo, adds the idea of complementary difference.
The term can be translated as facing, corresponding to, or matching him.
The sense communicated by the text is that she helps him realize his vocation within creation.
He cannot do this as a solitary being.
The following verses, verses 19 to 21, deal with God's creation of animals who are then given names by Adam.
In biblical thought, naming is a sign of superiority.
You recognize the kind of thing it is, articulate that with your mind.
So those creatures like Adam are living beings, but none proved to be the is there the help that he needs.
Again, human beings need other human beings.
We are created for communion with others.
That points us to the first sense of complementarity within the Yahweh's text.
The help which God provides to Adam enables him to overcome solitude through communion, and in doing so realize his humanity.
God acts to resolve the problem of Adam's solitude through intervention.
Casting a deep sleep on Adam, the same sleep that precedes God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, God forms a woman from the man as he had formed Adam from the earth or Adama in Genesis two seven and then leads her to the man.
His response is also dramatic, a poem of joy for God's gift to him.
This is verse 23.
This one at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.
This one shall be called Isha, woman, for out of ish, man, this one has been taken.
The poetic declaration has two elements which are relevant to our concerns here.
The first is the word play in the Hebrew text which our English translations capture.
This one shall be called woman because out of man she's been taken.
For the first time in the text we have gender specific words employed instead of just adam, man, the man.
That's led some scholars, both ancient and modern, to argue that adam is created as androgynous and then is only sexual sexually differentiated by God's subsequent creative act.
There's reasons in both the language of the text and the narrative structure to reject that reading.
Other scholars read this declaration as Adam naming woman in the way that he had just named the animals in the previous verses.
That reading seems to overlook the strong note of equality present in the text.
It also misses a fundamental difference between this declaration and the naming of the animals.
In this case, Adam doesn't simply assign a name to another, he recognizes himself in a new way through her.
As Saint John Paul the second suggests in his catechesis on the body, this can be read as the discovery of the spousal meaning of the body.
He recognizes the meaning of his body in her femininity.
She in turn recognizes the meaning of her body in his masculinity.
The body bears witness to the complementarity of the sexes in their encounter with one another.
But this encounter in mutual recognition is not all Adam's poetic declaration discloses.
The second important aspect of Genesis two twenty three for what we're doing here is the use of covenantal language in the text in this verse and the ones before and after it.
The language of bone and flesh in two twenty three, the deep sleep, tardema in 21, and the verbs to leave, Hebrew azav, and to cling, Hebrew devak in 24, all have covenantal connotations.
The relationship of man and woman and their complimentary bodily differences are ordered to and in a sense fully realized in the covenant of marriage.
This designation of marriage as a covenant deeply intimated in the text will be made explicit in other texts in the Hebrew scriptures.
One could say that the complementarity of the sexes described in the second account of creation is again fully realized in marriage.
It's here that the problem of human solitude is overcome through friendship or communion And it is here that the full significance of the sexually differentiated body can be realized in the covenant of marriage in which the two become one flesh.
To summarize, the teaching of both, but to add a couple new elements.
Both accounts of creation offer strong affirmations of the basic equality of women and men in their fundamental humanity and in their creation by God.
With this basic equality, these texts also affirm a variety of ways in which women and men might be said to be complementary to one another.
The first might be called a complementarity of totality.
The idea articulated in the first creation account that humankind, adam in the collective sense, is only complete as male and female.
A second could be called procreative complementarity.
That is the way in which the bodily differences of male and female enable them to receive God's blessing of fertility.
A third could be called the complementarity of alterity.
The way in which the threshold of solitude is crossed by going out from oneself in order to relate to others.
We realize our humanity in fellowship and friendship, and we do this as embodied persons.
To use more philosophical language, we become an I when we recognize and give ourselves to a vow, another.
To conflate the teaching of the two accounts and also to employ language of Saint John Paul the second, he wrote, quote, man became the image of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons.
We image God most fully in communion and going out from ourselves in friendship and in love.
A fourth sense we can identify in the text could be called spousal complementarity, which adds to the previous idea the dimension of the sexually differentiated body and the way in which this makes possible the covenant of marriage.
Two further points deserve mention here.
The first is that these various senses of complementarity discerned in the creation accounts of Genesis do not stand in isolation from one another.
They are textually and canonically juxtaposed and in many ways interconnected.
We might say that they complement one another in helping us to understand the equality and complementary differences of human beings who are male and female.
The second is more significant.
The remainder of the second account of creation makes it clear that both the equality and all of these senses of complementarity that I've identified are attacked and destabilized by human sin.
A full examination of that claim would require another talk, another paper.
However, a couple of brief explanatory remarks can be made here.
To the strong notes of the fundamental equality of women and men sounded in both accounts of creation can be juxtaposed Yahweh's words to the woman after the sin of the first pair in Genesis three sixteen, your urge will be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
Commenting on this text, Saint John Paul the second states, women become the object of domination and male possession, which brings about the loss of stability of that fundamental equality which the man and woman possess in the unity of the two in marriage.
In other words, the relationship of the sexes now becomes characterized by a struggle for power and control.
Men fallen men use their physical strength and women's vulnerability, particularly during pregnancy, birth, and childcare to exploit rather than care for women even if those women are their wives.
But the various senses of complementarity identified above are also destabilized by sin.
The ideas of complement of a complementarity of totality and alterity are undermined by shame, fear, and the awareness of vulnerability that colors human perception and relationships after sin.
After their sin, Genesis three seven says their eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked, and so they made fig leaves to cover themselves.
Why?
Because now they're vulnerable.
They're they experience shame.
They experience fear.
They realize that they are vulnerable to be exploited by others.
Fallen human beings are alienated from one another in profound ways.
Procreative complementarity too is destabilized as indicated by Yahweh's declaration to the woman.
I will intensify your toil and childbearing.
In pain shall you bring forth children.
The original blessing of fertility is not removed, and the man and woman are not directly cursed, unlike the ground and the serpent.
But East Of Eden, childbearing is fraught with pain and peril for women, as work is marred by toil and human life is marred by death.
Finally, spousal complementarity is fractured by the alienation of human beings from one another, the disordering of their sexual drives, and the struggle for domination that infects male female relationships.
The marriage covenant remains, but the Hebrew scriptures treatment of issues such as divorce, polygamy, adultery, and other forms of sexual sin make clear that it's it is fractured in fundamental ways.
These features of the account in Genesis three are at once an etiological explanation of life in the world as we know it, and at the same time, a profound theological diagnosis in the symbolic language of the text of the impact of sin on human relationships in general and those between men and women in particular.
A couple of thoughts by way of conclusion, and I'm gonna abbreviate a little bit here in the interest of time.
What I've tried to show is that the idea of complementarity was not invented by Saint John Paul the second.
It was developed by Catholic proponents of phenomenological personalism in the early twentieth century and had already been deployed in magisterial teaching prior to his pontificate.
Certainly, the Polish pope used the term widely and deepened and developed it in the course of his teaching ministry.
Unsurprising, given the amount of attention he devoted to issues of marriage and the family, the human person, the dignity of women, and the relationships of women and men.
But beside that historical clarification, I've argued that a a deeper and more substantive claim, The idea of complementarity has biblical foundation.
In particular, the creation accounts of Genesis bear witness to the reality of equality and multiform complementary complementary differences between men and women.
And this language can therefore ground a positive articulation of sexual difference in terms of our own contemporary questions and issues.
It's I'll I'll I'll note just in passing, the relationship between scripture, doctrine, language is complex.
We use doctrinal language that isn't found in scripture.
When we say that the person of the son is consubstantial with the Father when we profess the creed, homosios in the Greek.
That language isn't in scripture.
Right?
It's language that the church used as a philosophically precise way to articulate the biblical witness of Christ's divinity.
So sometimes we use language to respond to a set of issues to encapsulate and articulate scriptural insights.
I think that's what's going on here in the case of complementarity.
It's been things like external historical developments and social forces that have spurred us to a deeper reflection on equality and difference between women and men.
The term is not found in scripture, but that doesn't disqualify it from doctrinal use.
What I've tried to show is that it is a very apt way to capture the basic equality of the sexes as well as the way in which differences between the sexes serve to invite and sustain new forms of reciprocity between them.
One does not have to deny or dissolve difference in order to achieve equality.
One need not see difference as polarized or polarizing to maintain unity.
The language of complementarity extends on the anthropological level, the Trinitarian resolution of the ancient philosophical problem of the one and the many.
Both equality and difference are equally basic in God and in the human person.
So our common humanity exists in two irreducible personal forms because male and female he created them.
Thank you.
I'll just Yeah.
Absolutely.
We have some time for a few questions.
Floor is open.
Yes, please, father.
You alerted, to the, idea that, especially the first chapter of Genesis has a sort of language reminiscent and resonant with other parts of the Bible?
Like Leviticus, it concerns itself with discussion of conditions of worshiping God, worldly.
Mhmm.
We make a mistake about what it means to be man and woman.
What does that do to our worship?
That's that's that's an interesting question, because clearly what the structure of Genesis one intimates with male female created in the image of God and but then the whole of creation, including humanity perfected in the worship of God on the seventh day, I I I mean, I think there's a reciprocal relationship.
In in a certain sense, we become fully the image of God when we worship the one who made us, when we recognize him and acknowledge him.
That's that's when creation turns back to the one who made it and speaks his praises and that's so that in a sense, worship is perfective of we we fully realize the image of God in us.
To to use more pastoral language, maybe we could say worship is healing.
When we really encounter God, come to know him and worship him, that can heal the broke our broken sense of who we are including our self-concept and our concept of ourselves as male and female.
But, certainly, having a struggle with that recognition of self-concept can be a limitation for people to know and encounter god.
I think of the the language of the second Vatican council, the pastoral constitution on the church.
Without the creator, the creature itself disappears.
We become opaque to ourselves when we lose touch with God.
In another place, Gaudium et Spes says, Christ fully reveals humanity, man, to himself and makes our vocation clear.
So we can only fully know ourselves in knowing and encountering God and worship is an integral part of that.
So confusion about ourselves can hold us back, but I and to to sound a very pope Francis note for a a moment, the encounter with God, a genuine encounter with God can start to bring about that healing and including the healing of our self-concept.
Because, again, worship is perfective.
Worship helps us be what God created us to be.
Great question.
Really interesting question.
Yes, please.
A more philosophical question.
Early on, you referenced the ontological distinction between male and female Mhmm.
In one of your quotes.
That's The in light of that, the form of human being, human being, qua human being, is it male, female, neither, or both?
Great question.
I think the language Saint John Paul the second gives us would, incline us to articulate this, identify this as saying, there is one human nature which exists in two irreducible personal forms in male and female.
So male and female are the two, I'll use slightly different language, the two personal expressions of the one nature of humanity or put more sharply philosophically, sexual difference is accidental to the level of human nature because human nature is possessed by both men and women, but it's essential to actually existing human persons.
So it it's therefore, I would suggest going extrapolating a little bit from what John Paul the second gives us, it's a relation constitutive of human personhood.
It's a relation at the bake base of our personhood, which then enables us to enter into other human and sacramental relations to become a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, whether through blood or through, religious profession, holy orders, marriage, creates new relations based on that fundamental relationality of male and female.
So the identification that we have, especially with John Paul the second, of, sexual difference as exist as on the level of the existence of the person, but not dividing us on the level of nature, I think is the is the key to articulate that.
Really, really good question.
Yes, please.
Something similar Cornelius to the problem of God and, Jesus.
K.
Say a could you say a little more?
What you were you know, There's one gun.
Yes.
And yet there are two personal expressions.
Well, three personal expressions.
So but no.
You're right.
The language analogy to malice Right.
But you can the same conceptually.
Exactly right.
And the lang no.
Excellent point.
So the lang notice the language we're using is Trinitarian language.
Right?
Nature, person.
The language of person by the way, the ancient world did not have a concept of that word.
It's not in scripture.
It's not in classical, philosophy or thought.
When Cicero said persona, he meant grammatical person, in legal incorporation, or the mask worn by a actor in a stage production.
But a uniquely existing individual who exists in relation to other it's not there in the age.
That came out of early Christian reflection on the mystery of the trinity.
In God we have one God who exists in three persons, whom we can know and name through their relations of origin to one another.
Even nature is in two persons.
Yes.
But you can make the analogy, extended and John Paul the second certainly did this because when let's let's take the analogy of marriage.
You have male and female who come together, who give themselves to each other in love, and then their love is concretized, embodied in a third who proceeds from them.
So the I vow of marriage gives rise to a we, the child, who's in a sense the fruit of the parent's love.
Analogously please note, analogy, fourth lettering council, whenever we use human and divine language, we're there's similarity but even greater dissimilarity.
Right?
So, okay, we're all I I don't want this going out as heresy anywhere.
Right?
But but so within the trinity, the father and son give themselves to each other in an eternal communion of love and the holy spirit is breathed forth, Saint Augustine says, as the gift of their mutual love to one another.
So we have that triadic structure of love realized perfectly within God, but then, you know, imaged, imperfectly reflected in human marriage and the family.
So that's why John Paul the second would call both the trinity and the family a communion of persons when you have relationships that are characterized by love and self gift.
Great, great question.
Yes, Chris.
So I I think, in the LGBTQ, movement, there has been a move away from the binary.
Mhmm.
Right?
So in second wave feminism and Mary Neely and Rosemary, in fact, Rutherford, there there wasn't, there there wasn't a rejection of male and female.
Right?
And the social constructionist was built around kind of throwing off those what they considered, roles that were assigned to them by society.
Right.
But we seem to be in a new place, right, where that's not really the aim.
The aim is to completely overcome the binary.
Kind of radical postmodernity position to, like, a kind of radical postmodernity position there?
I mean, I I I this is why, again, I can't stress enough.
Benedict's last, address, Christmas address to the Roman Curia.
I think in terms of a philosophical diagnosis, I think Pope Benedict nailed it, because once you separate gender and sex as de Beauvoir and others did, and it becomes simply a social construct, then the next step is simply saying, no, it's not created by society, it's personally created.
You've you've effectively dissolved the concept of human nature and its relation to the human body person, So now it's simply whatever I want it to be and whatever I want it to mean.
So we become self creating subjects.
Right?
And so there's any so desires become identities and the number of possible identities multiply, because we've lost the sense, this is Benedict's point, of ourselves as creatures made by a creator, made in his image as male and female.
When we lose that, we we get the kind of gender babble, tower babble that we're starting to see in our culture and society around us, I think.
But the key is that, in a sense, the dissolution of human nature and of our own creatureliness.
Yes, father?
The question of why though, is this seems to be that seem under the law or the stuff that these notions of woman pre creation, but actually rejection Sure.
Rejection.
And no, I I I don't dispute that, which is why Catholic new feminist writers have argued that the key to retrieving and rebuilding a a healthy anthropology is reuniting sex and gender.
And this is Pope Francis.
Right?
They can be distinguished but never separated.
We have to hold these together to think about the human person.
So there's a great collection of essay if you guys wanna do some philosophical heavy lifting by Michelle Schumacher called Woman in Christ Toward a New Feminism.
Really good heavy hitting philosophical essays on the complementarity of male and female, but a couple of the essays by Michelle Schumacher herself and a couple of her contributors really take on that task of how do we bring these two things that second wave feminism drove this wedge in between.
How do we bring them back together?
I think that's our one of our challenges today.
Well, we thank you for Thank you, father.