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by Anne Carr, B.V.M. University of Chicago
Theological Studies, Vol. 43, no.2 (1982) pp
279-297.
The
question explored in this paper is posed within the sisterhood of women who
share the concerns of religious feminism. It is reflected in the sizable
literature which represents the women’s movement in the synagogue, the
Christian Church, and the feminist spirituality movement, and which has already
developed into a tradition which is ecumenical, pluralist, and academically
serious. Religious feminists are united in the conviction that both feminism
and religion are profoundly significant for the lives of women and for
contemporary life generally. That shared concern includes the perspectives of
Jews, Christians, and those who claim no bond with either tradition. It
includes feminists who work for the reform of traditions - Jewish, Roman
Catholic, mainline or evangelical Protestant - and those who declare Judaism
and Christianity irredeemably biased against women and find religious homes in
the new forms of feminist spirituality.
Feminist scholarship within the Christian context, for all its variety, is
unified in its critical perception of sexism as a massive distortion in the
historical and theological tradition which systematically denigrates women,
overtly or covertly affirms women’s inferiority and submission to men
(patriarchy), and excludes women from full actualization and participation in
the Church and society. It is unified in its aim of freeing women from
restrictive ideologies and institutional structures which hinder
self-actualization and self-transcendence. And it is unified in its attention
to the interpreted experience of women as a source for religious and
theological reflection, especially as those analyses, whether secular or
religious, reflect the collective experience of women, in whatever groups of
race, age, class, nationality. Thus it is an interdisciplinary and co-operative
task.
The
differences within feminist religious scholarship as it relates to Christian
theology are accounted for by different perceptions of the depth and
pervasiveness of sexism within Christianity. In a 1977 survey of feminist
theology, Carol Christ argues that the essential challenge is posed by Mary
Daly’s claim that the gender and the intrinsic character and attributes of
the Christian God are patriarchal.(1) Christ divides feminist scholarship into
“reformist” and “revolutionary” approaches, and notes that
few reformists working within the tradition have responded to this criticism of
Christianity’s core symbolism. Feminist revolutionaries, on the other
hand, use the experience of women not only as a corrective but as a starting
point and norm. Free of the authorities of Judaism or Christianity, they
attempt to create new symbols and traditions on the basis of their own
perceptions of ultimate reality. While it remains to be seen whether the
writings of the revolutionaries - mainly concerned with symbols and
spirituality - will develop into traditional forms of theology, the reformists
face the deeper challenge of a “radical feminist transformation of
Christianity”:
A
serious Christian response to Daly’s criticism of the core symbolism of
Christianity either will have to show that the core symbolism of Father and Son
does not have the effect of reinforcing and legitimating male power and female
submission, or it will have to transform Christian imagery at its very core.
(2)
Since
1977, a number of publications have advocated what Christ calls the
revolutionary approach. Among them, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology is the most
powerful and provocative exploration of feminist analysis and spiritual
transformation.(3) Others deal with witchcraft, goddess worship, women’s
spiritual experience in literature, in dream analysis, and in natural bodily
processes.(4) The growth of goddess worship and witchcraft, or feminist Wicca,
has elicited criticism from Rosemary Ruether, who points out that the cult of
the Great Mother, claimed by feminist goddess devotees, emerged historically
from a patriarchal culture and “has to do with putting kings on thrones of
the world, not with liberating women or slaves.”(5) Similarly, witchcraft
was never perceived in medieval times as involving a female deity nor were
witches organized into cultic groups, as proponents of feminist Wicca claim.
All historical religious traditions are biased, Ruether argues, and thus it is
difficult to see how these “new” feminist religions are more radical
than the transformations sought by Christian feminists who work with the
critical or liberating traditions of the Bible. Ruether criticizes the
revolutionary groups for separatism and reversal of domination, perpetuation of
the nature/civilization split in female/male symbolism, assignment of goodness
to females and evil to males, and failure to work toward synthesis and
transformation. She adds that those who are alienated from Judaism and
Christianity and the culture formed by them are nevertheless part of that
culture. “If they try to negate that culture completely, they find
themselves without a genuine tradition with which to work, and they neglect
those basic guidelines which the culture itself has developed through long
experience in order to avoid the pathological dead ends of human
psychology.”(6) While sharply criticizing Judaism and Christianity, these
religious feminists remain unself-critical: “instead of creating a more
holistic alternative such feminist spiritualities succumb to the suppressed
animus of patriarchal religious culture.”(7)
Nevertheless, as Ruether demonstrates, the alienation and the criticism of
these women are profound and must be taken seriously. Daly’s critique of
Christianity, as the radical example, centers on God understood as Father, the
supreme patriarch in heaven who rules his people on earth and thus legitimates
the male-dominated order of society. Eve as the originator of evil symbolizes,
in fact, the original sin of patriarchy, a reification of sexual difference in
which evil is projected on to woman as the original “other.” The
figure of Christ represents idolatry of the male person of Jesus -
"Christolatry" - and projects models of victim, scapegoat, and self-sacrifice
especially presented to women in Christian history. The male symbols of God and
Savior, or the "ultimate symbol" of “the all-male Trinity,” the
“procession of a divine son from a divine father,” are not adequate
symbols for women.(8)
In
laying out the framework of her feminist critique of the major symbols of
Christianity, Daly charges male theology with a cerebral
“methodolatry” which renders the questions of women
“nonquestions” and data about women “nondata.” In contrast,
she makes such nonquestions and nondata central in rejecting Christian symbols
for their devastating effects on women; she argues that feminist experience
itself is the source of liberating spiritual experience for women in a world
without models. She adopts a method which entails moments of
“castration” and “exorcism” on its way to
“liberation”, and employs a powerful counter-symbolics in her
constructive efforts.(9)
Daly’s attack is on the broad symbolism of Christianity and the way it has
legitimated the subordination of women and reinforced women’s internalized
inferiority. Theologians have maintained that God transcends sexuality
(although God is “he” for most) and that the humanity of Christ, not
his maleness, is central in the Christian scheme (although, for many, maleness
was and is essential for priesthood). But these theological distinctions have
no impact on the ways the symbols actually function to support religious and
cultural ideologies that are crippling to women. To check this claim, one need
only review the explicit statements about women in Tertullian, Clement, Jerome,
Augustine, Aquinas, Luthey, Calvin, Knox, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr,
Teilhard de Chardin, modern and contemporary pronouncements of the Vatican,
and, of course, the Bible. Daly warns against the most common evasion of the
issue - trivialization - and her imaginative, sometimes eerie constructive
efforts drive home the necessity of reformulation. A thorough revisioning of
Christian theology is needed to redress so fundamental a distortion.
And
yet, although some feminists leave Christianity behind as destructive and
exclusionary, many thoughtful women remain in the churches. And Christian
feminists who take the radical critique seriously continue to struggle with the
symbols and their transformation. Both historically and in the present, the
Christian symbols of God, Jesus, sin and salvation, the Church and the Holy
Spirit have been life-giving and liberating for women.(10) Recognizing that we
live in the religious and cultural context of traditions that have formed us
and in part freed us, held by faith, Christian feminists attempt to cope with
Christianity from within. The problem is not solved by adding mother or parent
images to God as father (although to image God as female, to think of God as
“she,” may be important); for parental images of God are problematic
in relation to the experience of women and the problem of selfhood.(11) Rather,
the task is to search for resources within the bibilical, theological, and
intellectual traditions that enable Christian feminist theology to be
understood as an intrinsic theological task, unlike other partial theologies
(of play, work, even so-called theologies of women), i.e., applications of
Christian themes to contemporary issues; for the task implies not only a
Christian critique of sexist or patriarchal culture but a feminist critique of
Christianity.
Resources for Feminist theology
In
the search for resources that enable Christian feminist theologians, male and
female, to work fruitfully within the tradition and to take radical feminist
criticism seriously, several critical requirements present themselves. The
first is the need to ground the possibility of understanding past theological
tradition both critically and constructively, of seeing it anew from the
perspective of contemporary questions. Ruether’s observation about the
loss of cultural guidelines in the attempt to work outside the tradition can be
expanded. Women are in the cultural and religious traditions formed by Judaism
and Christianity; they give us the very language with which we formulate our
criticism and the symbols and countersymbols with which we imagine the new.
Recent discussion of hermeneutics and critical theory provides an important
resource in this context. H. G. Gadamer’s work (12) on the universality of
the hermeneutic standpoint offers a foundation for Christian feminist theology
as it attempts to understand the tradition adequately and to forge new
interpretations. He has shown how all real understanding (truth as event) is in
fact new understanding as it occurs in the dialogue with tradition. Thus
tradition is conceived as a living address and responsive source for
questioning and reinterpretation, and it is only within this conversation that
tradition itself is understood. Gadamer argues further that all understanding
intrinsically bears its own moment of “application” - the unity of
cognitive, normative, and reproductive interpretation. The inherent connection
of issues of practical action with all genuine interpretation of tradition thus
overcomes any “merely cerebral” view of authentic theological work. A
text must be related to the interpreter’s situation if it is to be
adequately understood. Finally, Gadamer describes effective historical
consciousness, awareness of the history of the effects of texts, themes, or
tradition, as it has been interpreted and reinterpreted, as the context in
which the interpreter stands. It is this awareness that feminist theology
attempts to achieve in discussion not only of biblical and historical texts but
also of the ways these texts have been reinterpreted through centuries of
preaching and theological formulation - their always continuing effects on
practical life for women and for the self-understanding of women. Christian
feminist theologians recognize, I believe, that it is impossible to work
outside the effective history of tradition which offers us the subject matter,
the very questions with which we struggle.
While
accepting much of Gadamer’s formulation, the critical social theorist J.
Habermas has argued against certain conservative, elitist tendencies in
Gadamer’s reverence for the authority of past tradition and his insistence
on its universal linguisticality. Besides language or texts,
Habermas maintains, there is also a history of work and of power (or force or
domination). And language itself can be ideologically distorted. Thus
hermeneutics must be joined to critical theory which analyzes the societal
context and life-praxis in which all texts are embedded. Using psychoanalysis
as a cognitive analogue on the individual level for critique of systematically
distorted communication in the interest of transformation, Habermas points to
the necessity of critical reflection on social structures of authority and
domination, with an interest in emancipation. In addition to hermeneutical
“translation” of traditions, critical theory provides “ethical
and productive distance” from those very traditions in which we live.
Habermas argues against the illusory selfunderstanding of value-free
scholarship or the pursuit of “pure” knowledge - the illusion of
objectivism - by showingthe particular interests necessarily presupposed by the
cognitive achievements of the empirical, the historicalhermeneutic, and the
critical social sciences.
Orientation toward technical control, toward mutual understanding in the
conduct of life, and toward emancipation from seemingly “natural”
constraint establishes the specific viewpoint from which we apprehend reality
as such in any way whatsoever. By becoming aware of the impossibility of
getting beyond these transcendental limits, a part of nature acquires, through
us, autonomy in nature. (13)
Thus
it is a matter of “coming to terms” with the interests that in fact
underlie the pursuit of knowledge. The connection of knowledge and interests
ultimately means that “the truth of statements is linked to the intention
of the good and true life.”(14) The Christian feminist critique of
ideology, developed in the study of the theological tradition in its
historical, social, and ecclesiastical contexts, is not merely negation of the
past. As theology, it explicitly claims to be rooted in an emancipatory
interest in the future.
Paul
Ricoeur joins the hermeneutical and critical perspectives by pointing to the
necessity of both past and future orientations: “There are no other paths
. . . for carrying out our interest in emancipation than by incarnating it
within cultural acquisitions. Freedom only posits itself by transvaluating what
has already been evaluated." (15) The use of hermeneutical and critical theory
in feminist theology clearly offers grounds for the double possibility of
exposing the distortions of the past and of seeing something more, a future
possibility beyond the distortion, in the light of new questions - questions
raised by the feminist critique in both its cultural and religious dimensions.
A
second requirement for a feminist theology which takes seriously both the
radical critique and the authority of historical Christianity is a theory of
religious symbols which grounds both negative and positive moments in its
interpretive horizon. Tillich’s discussion is helpful in showing how
symbols open dimensions of transcendent reality inaccessible to technical or
instrumental reason.(16) He argues that symbols are born out of the collective
unconscious, within particular situations. Symbols participate in the reality
they signify, but participation in the depth dimension is not identity: the
transcendent or unconditioned always transcends every symbol of the
transcendent. Thus religious symbols remain under the “law of
ambiguity,” reflecting the tendency of religion to substitute symbols for
the divine itself, a tendency toward idolatry and the demonic. In every
religious symbol there is tension between the unconditioned in which the symbol
participates and the immanent, the appearance, the bearer of the Holy in a
particular cultural situation. The truth of religious symbols is independent of
empirical criticism; they die when the situation in which they were created has
passed or on innersymbolic grounds, through a religious criticism of religion.
“If Christianity claims to have a truth superior to any other truth in its
symbolism, then it is the symbol of the cross” as a denial of the
idolatrous tendency of all symbols.(17) Theology can neither affirm nor negate
symbols; it can only interpret them. In criticizing the functions of the
symbols of God and Christ, feminist theology exposes the idolatry which occurs
when preliminary or conditional concerns are elevated to unconditional
significance; something finite (maleness, sexuality) is lifted to the level of
the infinite.
This
law of the ambiguity of symbols is intensified by Ricoeur, who points out that
symbols are profoundly double or multivalent in their meaning. Their richness
is constituted precisely by the “close alliance” of regressive and
progressive elements.(18) The conjunction of “archeology” and
“teleology,” disguise and revelation, means that interpretation
includes two essential moments: an unmasking of regressive meanings or
demystification, and a restoration of meaning. An adequate feminist
interpretation is dialectical: it is suspicious as it unmasks the illusory or
ideological aspects of symbols which denigrate the humanity of women, and it is
restorative as it attempts to retrieve the genuinely transcendent meaning of
symbols as affirming the authentic selfhood and self-transcendence of women.
Ricoeur argues that the two moments are not extrinsic to one another;
“they constitute the over-determination of symbols,” their
“surplus of meaning,” and each requires the other.(19)
When
the mixed texture or double intentionality of all religious symbols, the law of
ambiguity, is taken seriously, the third requirement for feminist theology
emerges. An adequate theological method must exhibit a double critique. On one
side, the pluralism of feminist cultural and religious interpretations must be
related to the Christian symbols in their overdetermined meaning, and their
hidden, regressive, or ideological dimensions exposed. On the other, the
restored or purified meaning of the symbols, in their transformative
possibilities, must be brought to bear on the culture, and on religion
itself.(20) This double critique takes serious account of the experience of
women and at the same time holds itself bound to the progressive and
anticipatory power of the gospel and its symbols for women and for contemporary
life as a whole. The interpreted experience of women in society-economic,
cultural, religious - is used to criticize those dimensions of the Christian
tradition, the doctrine of God, Christology, ecclesiology, etc., which serve to
legitimate the exclusion and subordination of women both in theology and in the
practical life of the churches. And the newly interpreted understanding of the
gospel and of Christian symbols as authentically liberating for women is used
to criticize a sexist culture in which women are systematically exploited.
Christian feminist theologians are convinced that the symbols both of the
religious tradition and of the culture itself say “something more”
than is apparent on the surface.(21)
Recent Developments
As
feminist theology has developed, the critical correlation of the Christian
tradition with the contemporary cultural situation has consistently broadened
to include wider dimensions of women’s experience. In facing arguments
that the women’s question is peripheral and middle class in relation to
the global problems of war and peace, poverty and affluence, race, hunger, or
violence, feminist analysis has demonstrated the interrelationship of sexism,
racism, classism, and has shown, e.g., that “the majority of the poor are
women, and children dependent on women”; that “internationally
women’s occupations are characterized by low pay and low status”;
that black women in the U.S. are under a double bind; that women are more
likely to suffer physical and psychological violence; that “personal sin
is intimately related to structural sin.”(22)
The
major work of Christian feminist theologians thus far has been negation,
unmasking cultural and religious ideology that denies women’s full
humanity. While important studies of the forgotten history of women have indeed
appeared, (23) the first task has been analysis of the distorted traditions
about women in the Bible, in the Church Fathers, in medieval, Reformation, and
modern theology.(24) These criticisms are well known and need not be repeated.
The result of these studies, however, together with secular feminist research,
is that feminist theologians have at hand interdisciplinary analyses which
describe several layers in the ideology of sexism and the complex of issues
that must be taken into account.
Rosemary Ruether ably summarizes these.(25) From her historical studies she
describes a first layer of ideology in which woman is the servant, object, or
tool of male power, and shares inferiority with other reduced groups, lower
classes, subjugated races. A second understands women as evil or fearful,
representing bodiliness and carnality. A third layer is the romantic split or
reversal in which women are idealized as more moral or spiritual than men,
privatized, along with religion, art, and culture, and again used as mediators
of a lost female side of the male, as havens in a materialistic, immoral,
public, male world. The romantic idealization of women is frequently found in
contemporary theological or ecclesiastical statements which, no longer overt
about women’s inferiority or dangerous sexuality, now speak of
“complementarity,” a romantic term which bears the suspicion of
another rationalization for subordination. In addition, Ruether urges the need
to work on several levels, lest the co-optation of feminism by racism,
classism, and romanticism of the nineteenth century be repeated. There is
individual and subjective consciousness-raising and exorcism of debased
self-images; social analysis of structures and the envisioning of a
reconstructed society; self-criticism about class and racial contexts lest
women be divided against each other; ecological concern, in which nature and
the earth are understood analogously in feminist or nonhierarchical, mutually
supportive ways rather than in dominating or conquest models.
While
feminists are rightly warned not to propose premature solutions to the radical
criticism of Christian symbols,(26) there have been some efforts, especially in
biblical scholarship, which have already shown the possibility of
interpretations that are both Christian and feminist, that negate and affirm,
unmask and restore. These studies demonstrate sophisticated appropriation of
resources within the intellectual and theological tradition. The work of
Phyllis Trible, for example, employs a complex hermeneutical method to show
that “scripture in itself yields multiple interpretations of itself”
in its continuing interaction with the world: the black experience, Marxism,
psychology, ecology, and, in this case, feminism.(27)
As
the Bible interprets itself to complement or to contradict, to confirm or to
challenge, so likewise we construe these traditions for our time, recognizing
an affinity between then and now. In other words, hermeneutics encompasses
explication, understanding, and application from past to present.(28)
Trible reads the biblical texts from a feminist perspective, using rhetorical
criticism as a clue to the fusion of aesthetic and religious visions. She takes
the biblical metaphor of “the image of God male and female” (Gen
1:27) as a topical clue for her study of God and the rhetoric of sexuality to
show how “this basic metaphor contrasts with the imbalance of... partial
metaphors”: God as father, husband, king, warrior, God as pregnant woman,
mother, midwife, mistress.(29) Acknowledging that “the Bible
overwhelmingly favors male metaphors for deity," she explores female imagery
for God and uncovers traditions that, within the context of the goodness of
creation, show the equality of female and male in creation and disobedience, in
erotic joy, in mundane crisis. She concludes that female imagery “is not a
minor theme” but “with persistence and power it saturates
scripture”; some texts about male and female yield “the grace of
sexuality, not the sin of sexism.” Recognizing the permanent patriarchal
stamp of Scripture - accepting the radical feminist critique Trible shows the
Bible at the same time to be a “potential witness against all our
interpretations.” Her work exposes the dominant interest of past exegesis
and interpretation and uncovers neglected strands which “reveal
countervoices in a patriarchal document”(30) that offer possibility for
the future.
In
New Testament studies, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza similarly demonstrates
the possibility of scholarship which is both Christian and radically feminist.
She joins historical-critical methods, hermeneutic theory, and feminist
analysis in her discussion. Not only are there patriarchal texts and traditions
in the Bible, and texts which centuries of exegesis, preaching, and theology
have misinterpreted. In addition, she questions androcentric (malecentered)
traditioning: “whether the original narrator or author in an androcentric
way has told history that was not androcentric at all.”(31) She points out
that the New Testament does not transmit a single androcentric statement or
sexist story of Jesus, although he lived and preached in a patriarchal culture
. . . . In the fellowship of Jesus, women apparently did not play a marginal
role, even though only a few references to women disciples survived the
androcentric tradition and redaction process of the gospels.(32)
Those
references lead Fiorenza to uncover the importance of women as apostolic
witnesses of Jesus’ ministry, his death, his burial, and his resurrection
and the tendency of the New Testament authors to “play down the
women’s role as witnesses and apostles of the Easter event.”(33) She
analyzes traces of women’s history in the New Testament to demonstrate the
presence of a vigorous female ministry and participation in early Christianity.
When the evidence about women is presented, there is a mass of data to show
that Gal 3:28 was not an abstract ideal but a political reality in the early
Church.(34)
Fiorenza further questions the interpretive models used by scholars whose
understanding of reality is androcentric. She goes beyond the thematic approach
of “women and the Bible” or “female imagery for God” to
argue for an interpretive model of early Christianity that accounts for the
data about women disciples, apostles, prophets, teachers, missionaries,
patrons, founders and leaders of congregations and the importance of women and
the divine female principle in the Gnostic communities, the complaint, for
example, of Tertullian in the second century that women dared “to teach,
to debate, to exorcise, to promise cures, probably even to baptize.” She
suggests that the early Christian writings are not objective, factual history
but pastorally engaged writings that, despite the androcentric traditioning
process, reveal another story.(35)
Fiorenza shows that the orthodoxy/heresy framework of interpretation has
already given way to a theory of ecclesial patriarchalization occurring over
centuries through the New Testament and patristic eras, understandable
sociologically, but argued by historians as necessary for the Church’s
survival and thus used to legitimate the historical subordination of women. In
contrast, she offers an egalitarian model of early Christianity as a conflict
movement, based on the insight that Christianity was not originally patriarchal
nor integrated into patriarchal society.(36) That the Jesus movement and the
early Christian missionary movement were countercultural, radically
egalitarian, and inclusive, accounts for the evidence about women (and marginal
people) in the Jesus traditions and about women (and the abolition of social
distinctions of race, religion, sex, and class) in the early missionary
traditions.
Only an egalitarian model for the reconstruction of early Christian history can
do justice to both the egalitarian traditions of women’s leadership in the
church as well as to the gradual process of adaptation and theological
justification of the dominant patriarchal Greco-Roman culture and society.(37)
Fiorenza works from an interest in the past that attempts to free its
emancipatory impulses and traditions for the future, and with an implicit
notion of the ambiguity of religious symbols and texts, when she suggests that
“a biblical interpretation which is concerned with the meaning of the
Bible in a post-patriarchal culture” would have to hold that
“biblical revelation and truth about women are found . . . in those texts
which transcend and criticize their patriarchal culture,” that “such
texts should be used to evaluate and to judge the patriarchal texts of the
Bible.” (38)
From
these examples of historical and biblical studies, one concludes to the
profoundly ambiguous character of the Christian tradition and its symbolism
when read from a contemporary feminist perspective. At the same time, the
question raised by Mary Daly and Carol Christ - of the essentially patriarchal
and so irreformable character of Christianity’s core symbolism - is itself
brought into question. Ruether’s critique of the ideologies of sexism is
itself based on basic Christian symbols of love: equality, mutuality,
reciprocity, service in the context of the prophetic traditions of the Bible.
Trible and Fiorenza use the countervoices of the Bible as theoretical and
practical witness against traditional sexist interpretations. Each finds in the
tradition itself not merely “something more” to affirm but a more
that bears within itself the moment of negation. These biblical and historical
studies suggest that theology too, when interpreted from a feminist
perspective, will yield a similar dialectic.
Theological Considerations
Feminist theology is just beginning to address central theological symbols of
Christianity from a systematic perspective. The implications of feminism for
the doctrines of the human person, sin and grace, and ministry have been the
immediate issues.(39) The most important and difficult symbols, however,
because of their centrality in the tradition and the issue of maleness, are the
doctrines of God and of Christ. The work of Trible, Fiorenza, and Ruether,
however, undercuts the claim that these symbols are intrinsically patriarchal,
that they necessarily legitimate the subordination of women. In Trible’s
study:
The
repetition of the word God establishes similarity between God and the
human creatures, while the addition of the word the-image-of connotes
their differences. Here the lack of any formal similarity between the two
components suggests a semantic disparity. Thus, this latter metaphor saves the
former from idolatry by witnessing to the transcendent creator who is neither
male nor female nor a combination of the two. Only in the context of this
otherness can we truly perceive the image of God as male and female.(40)
Fiorenza writes:
The
fatherhood of God radically prohibits any ecclesial patriarchal
self-understanding. The lordship of Christ categorically rules out any
relationship of dominance within the Christian community. According to the
gospel tradition Jesus radically rejected all relationships of dependence and
domination.(41)
And
in a similar vein, Ruether:
Traditional theological images of God as father have been the sanctification of
sexism and hierarchalism precisely by defining this relationship of God as
father to humanity in a domination-subordination model and by allowing
ruling-class males to identify themselves with this divine fatherhood in such a
way as to establish themselves in the same kind of hierarchial relationship to
women and lower classes. Jesus, however, refers to God as father in such a way
as to overthrow this . . . relationship of the rulers over the ruled.(42)
Stressing themes of the otherness of God in the Bible, and iconoclasm
egalitarianism, and service in the ministry and message of Jesus and in early
Christianity, however important, does not suffice. These historical themes must
be brought to explicit theological, ethical, and practical reflection. For as
Daly and others point out, Jesus was a male; the dominant biblical images for
God are male. And inherently male symbols are no help to alienated women
because they have functioned so effectively in history to legitimate the
subordination of women. This point may not be trivialized. Feminist reflection
on the doctrine of God and Christology which shows that God is not male and
that Jesus’ maleness is a purely contingent fact must further attend to
the effective history of these doctrines, their practical and political uses.
Only if the effects of these symbols and doctrines are transformed now and in
the future can it be claimed that the symbols are not intrinsically
patriarchal, that they can be made available to women. A pragmatic criterion of
the future emerges which holds that the truth of theological formulation lies
in its effects.(43) Given the effects of the past, any adequate contemporary
theology of the doctrine of God or of Christology must unmask past ideological
uses of the symbols and attend to the transformative, ethical, and futural
horizons of interpretation. The contemporary hermeneutic situation includes
both past and future in its “applicative” moment. And given the
universality of the hermeneutic viewpoint, this applies to any responsible
theology, not just “liberation” theology.
Theology reflects on the symbols of God and Christ given us by the Bible and
centuries of tradition. Each symbol is partial, embedded in a cluster of
symbols and a network of myths out of which its meaning arises. It is the
symbol, in Ricoeur’s aphorism, which gives rise to thought and which bears
within itself both regressive and anticipatory possibilities. Thus the symbols
for God, whether mother or father, king or servant, warrior God or God of
slaves, intrinsically demand their own negation. The fatherhood of God bears
its own critique and transcendence of human fatherhood, especially in the
Christian narrative perspective of Jesus’ radical relativization of all
family ties and affirmation of God’s closeness.(44) All the symbols yield
finally to awareness that none of the pictures depicts God; none of the symbols
grasps the transcendent. They can only be interpreted anew, in succeeding
historical situations, “constantly needing,” in Schleiermacher’s
phrase, “to be refashioned for these present times.”
The
interpretative framework of our time must include critique of the social
effects and ideological uses of symbols and doctrines of God as well as ethical
and transformative application to the present situation. While feminist
theology points out the false uses of an idolatrous male god and its damaging
effects on women, on other oppressed groups, and on nature, its further task is
to search out a doctrine of God which is related to the intellectual,
practical, and ethical concerns of the present situation of women and which
suggests transformative or emancipative possibilities for the future. At
present it may reassert the not-yet, eschatological dimension of the Bible, or
the powerful tradition of negative theology, the ultimately hidden God, the
mystery and final incomprehensibility of God. Beyond these negations, however,
it continues to affirm God’s intimacy to persons and to the human
community in its present experience. (45)
Contemporary interpretations of the doctrine of God have in fact developed
concepts which, while maintaining the transcendence of God, affirm God as
involved in the ordinary experience of women and men in this world. “There
is a theological insistence, rooted in interpretations of the Bible and of
contemporary experience, that the God of Christian faith, while remaining God,
is intimate to the joy and the pain .... the struggle of human existence and
comes to be known precisely there.”(46) Such discussions, beginning in the
sixties, reveal common themes: the mystery of human experience and its
transcendent source or horizon; temporality, the future, and the historical
process; human autonomy, freedom, and responsibility; ultimate human dependence
and limit, fundamental trust, the reasonableness of belief in God in one’s
individual life. These themes are open to critical feminist appropriation
insofar as they have moved beyond parent/child models of the divine/human
relationship: conceptions of God as future, as the enabling source of human
freedom and autonomy, as the ground of trust in the experience of the self and
its possibilities of actualization and self-transcendence.(47) More recently,
political and liberation theologies, with their criticism of a privatized,
individualistic understanding of God and of human persons, and their attention
to the history of the suffering of oppressed groups, have developed similar
themes in relation to the collective struggles of humankind for liberation in a
social and political apprehension of God’s reality and character in
corporate human existence.(48)
It is
precisely here, I believe, in the collective interests of human liberation,
that Christian feminist theology is self-critical as well as critical of the
tradition, is willing to relativize - not trivialize or negate - its claims in
relation to other social and political issues and to fully human religious
issues of finitude, suffering, death, hope, transformation - the question of
God. For this feminism relates itself, as much separatist feminist thought does
not, to wider concerns: other liberation movements, social reconstruction,
distributive justice, ecology, and masculinity (not men) as a system of
hierarchies and dominating, exploitative, manipulative powers.(49) It sees
feminism itself - the woman - as the focal symbol, the original
“other” in a culture and society which generates a series of
oppressive relationships. It is a peculiarly powerful symbol, at once
collective and closely personal. Transformation of the male/female relational
system and the analogous series of exploitative relationships parallels new
interpretation of the doctrine of God in relation to the self, human freedom,
autonomy, the future, and to collective struggles for justice.(50)
In
Christology, feminist criticism has attended to the uses of the maleness of
Jesus as legitimating dominating systems in family, church, and society (e.g.,
headship) and to messages of self-sacrifice, sacrificial love and imitatio
Christi that have been detrimental to the essential self-affirmation of
women. It is clear why Christian feminism has focused on the ministry and
message of Jesus in his acceptance of women and prophetic reversals of societal
and familial orders. Jesus’ maleness is understood theologically as purely
contingent in the light of the patristic dictum about the Incarnation:
“what was not assumed is not redeemed.” In a profound sense,
Jesus’ sex does not make any difference for feminists, whose cause is,
finally, to emancipate sexuality from its distorted societal and religious
valorization, to overcome and transform traditional dualisms into a broader
pluralism which accounts for the variety of human qualities, talents, choices,
to move beyond anatomy as destiny in human valuation. But such an affirmation
may not be made too soon; it is a projection of a future possibility if and
when the maleness of Jesus ceases to be used theologically, ethically, and
ecclesiastically. Jesus as the Christ is affirmed by feminist women only after
a series of negations.
At
the same time, recent developments in Christology offer possibility for
critical feminist appropriation in their emphasis on the truly human Jesus and
the story of his conflict with dominant powers as the revelation of God. A
searching Christology (Rahner), the Logos as creative transformation (Cobb),
human suffering, oppression, and liberation in the cross of Jesus (Moltmann),
active discipleship of Jesus in the cause of justice (Sobrino), the rhetoric of
inclusion of all human concerns (van Beeck), the prophetic iconoclastic Christ
(Ruether) are Christological interpretations which transcend traditional biases
toward women; images of lordly power, domination, and triumphalism have been
left behind.(51) Emphasis on the future humanum as the liberating
“wholeness that we seek” is especially clear in the hermeneutical
Christology of Edward Schillebeeckx, who argues that it is necessary “to
have a constant movement to and fro between the biblical interpretation of
Jesus and the interpretation of our present-day experiences,” that the
story of Jesus is revelatory only if it effectively discloses that sought-for
humanum in contemporary terms. (52)
What place has Jesus of Nazareth in this whole history of human suffering in
quest of meaning, liberation and salvation? . . . Jesus’ universal
significance cannot be affirmed unmediated or by some abstractly objectivizing
argument, apart from the continuing, concrete effects of Jesus’ history.
What speaks to us in Jesus is his being human, and thereby opening up to us the
deepest possibilities for our own life, and in this God is expressed. The
divine revelation in Jesus directs us to the [human] mystery.(53)
The
present-day experience of Christian women finds, in the New Testament and
traditional doctrines of Christ, symbols of the human to negate and something
more to affirm, both memory and anticipation. The negative critique of past and
present uses of Christ to legitimate the subordination of women (and other
groups in Christian history) emerges from the positive, new, even surprising
contemporary and futural apprehension of the revelation of God in Jesus: his
unconditional assurance that humanity’s cause is God’s cause, that
the God of “pure positivity” wills human beings to live, that God
gives a future to the hopeless in us. Feminists do not project an alien cause
on the figure of Jesus. It is rather through a religious critique of symbols,
“on inner symbolic grounds,” that feminism can identify with Christ
and the world of possibility he projects.
Women’s religious protest and affirmation is a grace for our times. In its
protest about the clear and real issue of women, it raises to view the scandal
of the past and its confident, often idolatrous assertions about God and Christ
and human persons. In its courageous iconoclasm and its symbolic association
with the other “others” of history and the present, it exposes and
denies the splits, dichotomies, manipulation, and exploitation - the sin of our
times from a particular and practical perspective. In its new apprehension of
God and of Christ, it affirms a vision of human wholeness, integrity, and
community, a genuinely new Christian consciousness that extends inclusion,
mutuality, reciprocity, and service beyond its own causes. In so doing,
Christian feminism transcends itself and enables the tradition to transcend
itself, to become the hope, the future, that is promised.
Footnotes
1.
Carol P. Christ, “The New Feminist Theology: A Review of the
Literature,” Religious Studies Review 3 (1977) 203-12; cf. Mary Daly,
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston:
Beacon, 1973).
2.
Christ, “New Feminist Theology” 211, 205.
3.
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978).
4.
Cf. Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (Luna
Publications, 1976); Starhawk (Miriam Simos), The Spiral Dance: The Rebirth
of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1979); Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Rising: Women Writers on
Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon, 1980); Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of
the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston: Beacon,
1979); Penelope Washburn, Becoming Woman (New York: Harper and Row,
1977); and the essays in Part 4 of Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in
Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1979).
5.
Rosemary Ruether, “A Religion for Women: Sources and Strategies,”
Christianity and Crisis 39, no. 19 (Dec. 10, 1979) 307-11, at 310.
6.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Goddesses and Witches: Liberation and
Countercultural Feminism,” Christian Century 97, no. 28 (Sept.
10-17, 1980) 842-47, at 846.
7.
Ibid. 847.
8.
Beyond God the Father 13-43, 44-68, 69-97; Gyn/Ecology 37-38. Cf.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Random House, 1952) xix
ff. for the concept of the “other.”
9.
Beyond God the Father 11-12, 69-97.
10.
Cf. Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions,
ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1979).
11.
See Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience in the
Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, D.C.: University
Press of America, 1980) 162-67.
12.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975), esp.
section 2 of Part II, 235-344, and Supplement 11, 491-98; cf. Paul Ricoeur,
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort
Worth: Texas Christian University, 1976) 912, 39-95.
13.
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon,
1968) 301-17, at 311; Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen
Habermas (Cambridge: MIT, 1981) 169-93. The phrase “ethical and
productive distance” is Paul Ricoeur’s, in “Ethics and Culture:
Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” Philosophy Today 17 (1973)
164-65, cited in McCarthy, Critical Theory 192. The debate between
Gadamer and Habermas is clarified in their respective articles in
Continuum 8 (1970) 77-95, 123-33.
14.
Knowledge and Human Interests 317. Mary Knutsen, whose forthcoming study
Shrieking Heaven: Resources in Crticial Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, and
Interpretation Theory for Feminist Theology will provide a thorough
discussion of these issues, provided helpful criticism in this context. For
another use of critical theory in theology, see Francis Schüssler
Fiorenza, “Critical Social Theory and Christology: Toward an Understanding
of Atonement and Redemption as Emancipatory Solidarity,” Proceedings of
the Catholic Theological Society of America 30 (1975) 63-110.
15.
Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture,” ibid.
16.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York:
Oxford University, 1964) 53-67, and Systematic Theology 1 (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1951) 238-41.
17.
Theology of Culture 67.
18.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New
Haven: Yale University, 1970) 3-56, 494551; Interpretation Theory 45-69.
19.
Freud and Philosphy 459-551, 496; Interpretation Theory 45-46.
The as yet unpublished work of Patricia Harrington on the symbol of the Virgin
of Guadalupe was particularly important in suggesting the helpfulness of
Tillich and Ricoeur for a feminist theory of symbolism.
20.
Cf. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology
(New York: Seabury, 1975) 32-34, 4348, and “Particular Questions within
General Consensus,” Consensus in Theology? ed. Leonard Swidler
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980) 33-39.
21.
Ruether, “A Religion for Women” 309: “All significant works of
culture have depth and power to the extent that they have been doing something
else besides justifying sexism. They have been responding to the fears of
death, estrangement and oppression and the hopes for life, reconciliation and
liberation of humanity.” I have attempted to use Tracy’s model of
critical correlation in “Theological Anthropology and the Experience of
Women,” Chicago Studies 19 (1980) 113-28.
22.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Sexism and Conversion,”
Network 9, no. 3 (May-June 1981) 15-22; cf. also Rosemary Radford
Ruether, New Woman New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation
(New York: Seabury, 1975) 115-33, 162-85.
23.
See, e.g., Women of Spirit, ed. Ruether and McLaughlin, and Women in
American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1980).
24.
See, e.g., Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian
Thought, ed. Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977); Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian
Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1974); Margaret A. Farley, “Sources of Sexual Inequality in the History of
Christian Thought,” Journal of Religion 56 (1976) 162-76.
25.
New Woman New Earth 24-31; cf. also Elizabeth Janeway, Man’s
World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology (New York: Dell,
1971), and Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo
and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University, 1974).
26.
Christ, “New Feminist Theology” 206.
27.
God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) 4.
28.
Ibid. 7.
29.
Ibid. 22; cf. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory 64.
30.
God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality 201-2; cf. also Phyllis Bird,
“Images of Women in the Old Testament,” Religion and Sexism
41-88; Leonard Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Women
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979) 75-159.
31.
“Interpreting Patriarchal Traditions," The Liberating Word, ed.
Letty M. Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976) 49
32.
Ibid. 52; cf. Swidler, Biblical Affirmations 161-356.
33.
Ibid. 53.
34.
Cf. “Word, Spirit and Power: Women in Early Christian Communities,”
Women of Spirit 30-70; “Women in the Early Christian
Movement,” Womanspirit Rising 84-92.
35.
“‘You Are Not To Be Called Father,’” Cross Currents
29 (1979) 301-23.
36.
It is important to distinguish here between a cultural and a religious
tradition, and each of these within both Judaism and Christianity. Religious
tradition in each case represents a transcendent horizon. It is not the case
that countercultural Christianity is to be seen over against Judaism as a
patriarchal unity; the Jewish religious tradition reveals its own transcendent
dynamic. I am grateful to Susan Shapiro, who brought this important distinction
to my attention. Cf. also Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminism and
Anti-Judaism,” Cross Currents 28 (1978) 306-9.
37.
“‘You Are Not To Be Called Father’” 318.
38.
“Interpreting Patriarchal Traditions” 61. Similar approaches are
followed, in the evangelical tradition, by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty,
All We’re Meant To Be (Waco, Texas: Word, 1974), and, in the Roman
Catholic ordination discussion, my essays “The Church in Process:
Engendering the Future,” Women and Catholic Priesthood: An Expanded
Vision, ed. Anne Marie Gardiner (New York: Paulist,1976) 68-88, and
“Women’s ‘Place,’ Ordination, and Christian Thought: Old
Answers to New Questions,” Listening 13 (1978) 158-75.
39.
See, e.g., Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,”
Womanspirit Rising 23-42; Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace; Carr,
“Theological Anthropology and the Experience of Women”; on women and
ministry, see the bibliography by Hyang Sook Chung Yoon in Women and
Priesthood, ed. Carroll Stuhlmueller (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical
Press, 1978) 179-85, and Anne E. Patrick, “Women and Religion: A Survey of
Significant Literature, 19651974,” TS 36 (1975) 752-57.
40.
God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality 200-201.
41.
“You Are Not To Be Called Father”’ 317.
42.
New Woman New Earth 65.
43.
See Edward Schillebeeckx, God the Future of Man (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1968) 181-86.
44.
See David Bakan, And They Took Themselves Wives: The Emergence of Patriarchy
in Western Civilization (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979); Robert
Hammerton-Kelly, God the Father: Theology and Patriarchy in the Teaching of
Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979). Diane Tennis, in “The Loss of
the Father God: Why Women Rage and Grieve,” Christianity and Crisis
41, no. 10 (June 8, 1981) 164-70, makes too literal and direct a move, I
believe, from human fatherhood to God, bypassing the moments of negation or
relativization in interpreting the symbol.
45.
Cf. Daly, Beyond God the Father 37-38; Thomas J. J. Altizer, Total
Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today (New York:
Seabury, 1980) 25-36.
46.
Anne Carr, “The God Who Is Involved,” Theology Today 38 (1981)
314.
47.
See, e.g., Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York:
Seabury, 1978) 24-89; Edward Schillebeeckx, God and Man (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1969) and God the Future of Man (New York: Sheed and Ward,
1968); Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Idea of God and Human Freedom
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973) and What is Man? (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1970); Jürgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope (New York:
Harper and Row, 1967); Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of
God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1969), Reaping the Whirlwind:
A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury, 1976), and
Message and Existence: An Introduction to Christian Theology (New York:
Seabury, 1979); David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order; Schubert Ogden,
The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1965);
Hans Küng, Does God Exist? (New York: Doubleday, 1980).
48.
See, e.g., Johannes B. Metz, Theology of the World (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1969); Faith in History and Society (New York: Seabury, 1980);
Juan Luis Segundo, Our Idea of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1974);
Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and
Salvation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1973).
49.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Feminist Theology as a Critical
Liberation Theology,” TS 36 (1975) 605-26.
50.
Cf. Margaret Farley, “New Patterns of Relationship: Beginnings of a Moral
Revolution,” TS 36 (1975) 627-46; Anne Wilson Schaef,
Women’s Reality (Minneapolis: Winston, 1981).
51.
Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith 295 ff.; John B. Cobb Jr.,
Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975);
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row,
1973); Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American
Approach (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1978); Frans Josef van Beeck, Christ
Proclaimed: Christology as Rhetoric (New York: Paulist, 1979); Rosemary
Radford Ruether, “Christology and Feminism,” To Change the World:
Christology and Cultural Criticism (New York: Crossroad, 1981) 45-56.
52.
Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Seabury, 1979) 606-12;
Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (New York: Seabury, 1980) 76.
53.
Jesus 623; Christ 76.
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