Noah Hahn

Michael Rea offers several objections to the traditional view that it is more accurate to characterize God as masculine than as feminine. The objections depend on several premises drawn from perfect being theology and the doctrine of the image of God. They amount to a cumulative argument that (roughly) if God is accurately described as predominantly masculine, then either women are inferior to men (because masculinity would be a great-making property) or women are not made in God’s image (as the _imago Dei_ doctrine teaches). I argue that Rea’s arguments fail, and that divine masculinity would not entail the inferiority of women. In fact, in at least one sense, it might entail the inferiority of men. I do not thereby argue that traditionalism is right—only that Rea’s argument does not overturn it. I close with some suggestions for the future of gendered natural theology that may escape the problems I raise for Rea’s approach.

Thomistic transubstantiation attempts to explain how Jesus’ body and blood come to be present on the altar after the Sacramental bread and wine are consecrated. Although Aquinas’s argument for this theory is stronger than his critics give him credit for, the argument ultimately fails. Examining two of Aquinas’s premises that have gone relatively unnoticed in the literature, I argue that Aquinas does not, and probably cannot, define the terms presence in a place and local motion with sufficient univocity to preserve the integrity of his argument. I then present the Lutheran view of Sacramental presence, which avoids the difficulties that face the Thomistic view.