God as Male Priest

"In his actions in and toward the world of his creation, the one God and Father reveals himself primarily and essentially in a 'masculine' way."-- Fr. Thomas Hopko (Women and the Priesthood, p 240)


Alice. C. Linsley

Among Abraham's ancestors the sun was venerated as the emblem of the Creator. It was believed to inseminate the earth and bring forth life. This is a distinctly masculine image for God and key to understand the origins of Messianic expectation among the Nilo-Saharans.

Their worldview was based on universally observed binary distinctions such as male-female, the east-west solar journey, dark-light, life-death, and on human experiences on a fundamental level of existence. The binary sets are observed by all people in all places on earth. The biblical worldview is not concerned with subjective distinctions such as tall-short, talented-untalented, dark skin-light skin, intelligent-unintelligent, etc. as these are not absolute and objective. The Bible is concerned about what is real ontologically.

The ancient Afro-Asiatics honored many realities, but one of the most significant is the male-female distinction. They associated maleness with the Sun and femaleness with the Moon. This association extended to semen and milk. The Sun inseminates the earth with its light and warmth and the Moon, which influences tides and body fluids, stimulates female reproduction and lactation. The ancients observed a relationship between the lunar cycle and the periodicity of the menstrual cycle. In France, menstruation is called le moment de la lune.

The binary distinctions were the basis for law and religious practice in the Afro-Asiatic Dominion. Both law and religion recognized that one of the opposites is always greater in some way. The Sun’s light is greater than moonlight. Males are stronger and larger than females. Heaven is more glorious than earth, and life is superior to death. Only in this last category is the feminine greater than the masculine, because the blood of menstruation and childbirth speaks of life, whereas the blood drawn by men in war, hunting and animal sacrifice speaks of death.

Because the Creator wants the distinction between life and death to be clear at all times to all peoples, He established this distinction between the “blood work” of women and men. This distinction between the two bloods is the basis for the priesthood, an office ontologically exclusive to males, since only men in the priestly lines could fill the office.

Warriors were responsible for the blood they shed in battle. Hunters were responsible for the blood they shed in the hunt, and priests were responsible for the blood of the animals they sacrificed. Midwives, wives and mothers were responsible for the blood of first intercourse, menstrual blood and blood shed in childbirth. The two bloods were never to mix or even to be present in the same space. Women didn’t participate in war, the hunt, and in ritual sacrifices. Likewise, men were not present at the circumcision of females or in the “mother’s house” to which women went during menses and to give birth.

It is also significant that among tribal peoples, brotherhood pacts are formed by the intentional mixing of bloods between two men, but never between male and female. The binary distinctions of male and female were maintained as part of the sacred tradition.


Female Blood Work

As a point of fact, the first reference to the shedding of blood in the Bible is not Cain’s murder of Abel. The first reference is to the blood of “the Woman” who would give birth to the One who would crush the head of the cosmic serpent and restore Paradise. This is significant because it places life-giving blood before killing. In other words, the blood work of women is posed as both prior to and equal to the blood work of priests.

In the Bible, the first blood work of women is not the birth of Cain, but the birth of Messiah promised to “the woman” in Eden in Genesis 3:15. This woman is not Eve, since Eve is not named by Adam until verse 20. The first blood work of Scripture is Christological, as indeed is the blood work of priests.


Male Blood Work

God sacrifices an animal to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21). In the Biblical chronology this places God as priest between the birthing blood of the Woman (Gen. 3:15) and Cain's murder of his brother (Gen. 4:8). God is at the sacred center between life and death. There God sacrifices what is His for humanity. In this sense, God is the first priest and that first animal that covers nakedness is a symbol of the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.

From the Afro-Asiatic perspective, which is the perspective of the Bible, God is male and God is priest.  It is clear also that God condescends to grant to the lesser a greater role. So it is that a young maiden from the ruler-priest lines should become the un-wedded Bride of God and the ever-virgin Mother of Christ our God.


Related reading:  The Importance of Binary Distinctions; The Binary World and Kenosis; Blood and Binary Distinctions; The Priesthood as Heavenly Ordinance; Ideologies Opposed to Holy Tradition; Why God is Father and Not Mother by Mark Brumley; Why I am Not a Protestant