Avoiding Heresy

Many heresies spring from failure to apply basic critical thinking skills. Such is the case with TEC's 'sexual ethics' and with 'gender-neutral' Bibles. What do these have in common? They share an erroneous biblical anthropology.

There is no ontological difference between male and female. Both are human and both are fully in the image of God. Both crown the Creation, being created on the 6th day. Yet it is obvious that men and women are different. The Bible understands the difference as supplementarity. To understand the biblical worldview we must grasp the concept of binary distinctions and the concept of supplementarity. These concepts must be held together to avoid heresy and understand what the Bible teaches us about the created order.

In a sense, woman being created last, is the gemstone of the crown of creation. And of course, this is what Orthodox and Catholic Christians say about THE Woman, the Theotokos, from whom Christ our God became flesh by the Holy Spirit. If we say that the woman is of a substance different from the man, we fall into heresy, because that would mean that the substance of Christ (which HE took from his mother) is different from the substance of men. This is impossible, of course, since Jesus was born a male.

The Faith we've received from the Afro-Asiatics through Abraham recognizes a distinction and supplementarity between male and female when it comes to the order of creation. The man was made first, then the woman. The headship of males was expressed in the blood work of hunting, war, execution of lawbreakers, and in animal sacrifice by the ruler-priest. So Evangelical Anglicans who ordain women as priests but not as bishops on the Principle of Headship are missing the point!

The blood work of women is different and supplementary to the blood work of men. Women sacrifice blood in first marital intercourse. They bleed in their monthly cycle and in childbirth. The blood shed of women represents life and is distinct yet supplementary to the blood shed by men in hunting, war and animal sacrifice.

Among the Afro-Asiatics it was taboo to allow distinct entities to become confused. This is why both men and women were circumcised (a custom that continues in many parts of Africa). Male circumcision was seen as an enhancement of maleness by removing the flabby foreskin that resembles the female organ. The supplement to the circumcised male could only be a circumcised female. In Pharaonic circumcision, the clitoris and labia minora are removed to make the female organ less like the male organ. (Read more about this here.)

The prohibition against mixing types, be they fibers, seeds or blood, is like the prohibition against confusing the holy with the unholy, or blurring the distinction between life and death, such as happens when a baby goat is boiled in its mother's milk (forbidden 3 places in Scripture). That is why each seed is to go to its own kind. As plants are born from the earth, so the seeds of plants return to the earth. As the man is born from the woman, so the seed/semen of man is to return to woman. The spilling of seed called 'onanism' is regarded as an unrighteous deed, a violation of the order of creation. So obviously is homosex.

Bloods were never permitted to mix or even to be present in the same space. And of course, this is what Orthodox and Catholic Christians say about the Eucharist, where Christ's Blood alone is to be present. (That's why, according to ancient instruction in the Priests' Manuals, the priest must immediately leave the Holy Place should he accidently cut himself and bleed.) This is why women never can be priests and why they are "churched" after childbirth, following the ancient custom.

God's ordering of creation is for the benefit of those who would know God's Nature (as St. Paul tells us in Romans). As male and female alike are in God's Image, and God is not divided, neither can we divide in substance the male and the female. In marriage the two are able to become one because they are of the same "kind" and supplementary. Supplementary means that one cannot be perceived to exist without the other. This is a picture of the Godhead - for the Father and the Son (Logos) can't be perceived to exist one from the other. To say that the Word became flesh is to say that the Son of God became human in order to redeem and restore believing humanity to our original state. We fall into heresy when we leave out the part about the "Son" of God. The language of Father and Son is not coincidental to what God is revealing to us. The Father delivers the Kingdom to the Son. The Father presents the Church as a pure and radiant Bride to the Son.

The supplementarity of opposites is evident only when their distinctions are clear. Satan directs a good deal of effort to blurring distinctions by encouraging androgenous dress, homosex and fanning the flames of feminism. Yet if we attend to the binary distinctions of the created order which God declared "good" and we affirm their supplementarity, we are less likely to stray from the one true Path, which is not thing, but Person.