God Speaking Through Gender

On the subject of women priests, Bill Castle passes along this essay in which C.S. Lewis writes:

Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity….

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.

Bill comments that this issue "boils down to the idea that God created men and women, and that He revealed Himself in the male gender (both as God the Father and Son and a human person of the male sex), and that He did both with purpose deeper and more essential than the legal fictions involved in the classification of all persons as neuters."

Rob