No required reading today. Instead I found myself drawn into a theological exchange with a friend.
Sophia Evangeline Luke published a piece asking what a woman is — arguing that Evangelical Christianity needs a more robust philosophical ontology than “adult human female.” It’s a serious piece and worth engaging. I left a comment offering a friendly disagreement.
My instinct is that accepting the question on those terms already concedes ground. The demand for a philosophical definition before we’ll affirm what we already know is itself an ideological move. My covenantal training is starting to sharpen how I read these things — in the Hebrew cast of mind, the relational is the ontological. A woman is the one formed from Adam’s side, fitted for union, capable of bearing life. That’s not thin. The Theotokos, Hosea’s marriage, Paul on Christ and the Church — that’s a robust ontology. It’s just not Aristotelian.
Maybe Jerusalem doesn’t need Athens quite as much as we think. The Roman Catholic Church already made that mistake with transubstantiation.
Tomorrow: back to the required reading.
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