Equal before God

Christian feminist theology denounces male domination of women as 'sin' butchers

In traditional Christianity, redemption is the reconciliation of the fallen soul with God, won by Christ on the cross, applied to the soul in baptismal regeneration, and then developed through the struggle to live virtuously sustained by grace. In the classical Christian paradigm, women in order to be redeemed, must subordinate themselves to men, because women, to paraphrase I Timothy 2:11�15, were created second and sinned first.

Feminist theology, however defines women and men as created equal, denounces male domination of women as sin. Redemption then becomes transformed gender relations that overcome male domination, rather then a call to women to submit to this domination as their means of salvation.

In the sixteenth century, humanist Agrippa von Nettlesheim laid the groundwork for the feminist reading of Christianity. He argued in his 1509 treatise Female Preeminence that women�s and men�s souls were created equally in the image of God, but that women were superior to men because they reflect the wisdom nature of God and more attuned to life and virtue. Agrippa argued further that male domination of women is neither God�s original design for creation, nor punishment for female priority in sin, but rather reflects men�s propensity to injustice and tyranny. Christ restored women to equality and gave them equal leadership in the church, but men refused to accept this and have distorted the message of the Christ to justify the continued subordination of women in the church and society.

Seventeenth century Quakers, while not stating these as emphatically, agreed with Agrippa�s basic ideas on gender equality. They believed women and men were created equal, but, through sin, men gained power over women... Those who would silence women in the church are the �seed of Satan� and continue in the fallen state. The Quakers translated their ideology of original and restored gender equality into participation of women in missionary work, preaching, and ministry in Quaker meetings. But they did not inaugurate a struggle for women�s equality in public society because their sectarian view of the Quaker realm as an expression of the fallen world disposed them to withdraw from, rather than participate in public life.

In nineteenth�century America, however, several abolitionist feminists challenged this sectarian stance by uniting the Quaker theology of creation restored in the spirit with American democratic thought. Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lucretia Mott, Sussan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton inaugurated the struggle for women�s civil right in America on Biblical and theological grounds.

Redemption for these nineteenth-century American feminists meant not only restoring equality between women and men, but also transforming the social and legal systems that deny women their rights. Redemption is realized, not primarily in an other-worldly escape from the body and the finite world, but by creating and encouraging personal and social relations of justice and peace between all humans here and now. This is the true message of Christ and the Gospels. The churches have betrayed Christ by preaching a theology of female silence and subordination.

Twentieth century feminist theology developed within the tradition of this�worldly progressive hope redefining injustice in the context of gender hierarchy, which is seen as central to a total system and ideology of patriarchy. Feminism sees patriarchy as a multi�layered system of domination, centered in men�s control of women, but including class, race, and generational hierarchies, clericalism, war, and the domination of nature.

Feminist theologians, such as Brazilian Ivone Gebara, stress that overcoming patriarchy means dismantling an entire cosmo�vision based on a split universe in which God is located in the spiritual realm outside of creation and ruling over it. Redemption is seen as sending God down from this higher spiritual realm to a lower, material world lacking spiritual life. Gebara argues that spirit and matter, God and body need to be reintegrated, locating the divine power of renewal of life�giving and loving relations in mutual rationality between all beings, not dominating control from outside.

Gebara also beings to dismantle the dualism that feminists accept from Biblical thought, namely an original paradise of the beginning when all was perfect harmony and a kingdom of God at the end of history when all will again be in perfect harmony, contrasted with present evil. Gebara questions the literalism of a utopian future when all evil will be conquered. Rather, she wishes to distinguish between the finitude of life and death, of joy and tragedy, contrasted with the construction of a system of domination based on the false attempt to secure the powerful from vulnerability, which turns most humans and the earth into victims.

The shift from other�worldly to this worldly redemptive hope also entails a revised anthropology and Christology, or way of interpreting Jesus�s life and teachings. Feminist theologians reject the classical notion that the human soul in radically fallen, alienated from God, and unable to reconcile itself with God, in need of an outside mediator. Instead, the human self is defined through its primary identity as image of God. This original goodness and communion with its divine ground of being continues to be the true nature of women and men.

Jesus�s role becomes quite different in feminist theology. His is the root story for the redemptive process in which we must all be engaged, but he does not and cannot to do it for us. No one person can become the collective human whose actions accomplish a salvation which is then passively applied to every one else. Jesus�s story can be a model for what we need to do for ourselves and with one another.

Yet Christian feminists are remarkably persistent in their attachment to the Jesus story. Across many cultures around the world feminists, womanists,, and mujeristas continue to affirm their relation to Jesus, even as they reject the Christological superstructure that has been erected by classical Christianity in his name. These feminist theologians remain Christian, however radical in their repudiation of doctrines about Christ as redeemer, in their continued affiliation with the Jesus story as the foundation for their feminist theology. Why is this? Does this attachment simply indicate some residual need for male authority? Some fear of breaking the final tie with Christianity? These fears and dependencies may exist, but they do not explain the resiliency of the Jesus figure for feminist theology.

Feminist liberation theology is a human project, not an exclusively Christian project. Revisioned Christian symbols can be one cultural resource among others in a struggle for liberation that can become global only if authentically rooted in many local contexts.
The Jesus story continues to be a model for Christian feminists because it exemplifies the redemptive paradigm of feminist liberation: dissent against oppressive religious and political structures, taking the side of the oppressed, particularly women, living egalitarian relations across gender, race and class, and pointing towards a new time when these hierarchies will be overcome and, anticipating redeemed relations in a community of celebration here and now.

Sceptics might wonder whether, as Christians in search of a Jesus to ground our faith, we are not, once again, looking down a well and seeing our own faces reflected in the bottom... If we claim the Jesus story because it echos our own story, why not just discard it and tell our own story?

I would resist doing this for several reasons. Most basically, claiming the Jesus story expresses a desire to continue to belong to the church, not as a hierarchical structure, but as a community of faith, to have historical roots, to lay claim to a people, while at the same time calling that people repent of its patriarchy and to understand its calling to redemption as liberation from patriarchy.

Yet the fact that Jesus was male is a major problem for claiming the Jesus story as the root for feminist theology. The patriarchal church has used his maleness to insist that women cannot represent Christ. One solution is to deconstruct the assumption of patriarchal theology that maleness is normative for being fully human and the image of God. Jesus� maleness is declared to be one �accident� of his historical reality among others, like being Jewish, a first century Galilean. What distinguishes Jesus as a model is not his maleness but his humanness as one who loves others and opts for the most vulnerable and oppressed, especially women. One imitates Christ by living in a like manner, not by displaying male genitalia.

While this deconstruction goes a long way to solving the problem, it does not overcome the basic social symbolic structure in which Jesus, a male, opts for women as object of concern. Women can receive Jesus� liberative praxis, but women cannot liberate themselves and other women (and men). Thus, Christian feminist theology is pushed to go beyond telling the Jesus story as one of a �good man (not lord, but brother) who really cared about us� and dares to parallel the Jesus story with the stories of women liberators. We also want to be able to experience the liberating women in our own culture and ethnicities. Thus some Christian feminists begin to lift up female Christ figures of their own cultures.

As more African�American, Hispanic-American, Asian, African, and Latin American feminist theologians find their voices, they place their hopes for redemption from gender injustice in new cultural contexts. European or European�American feminists are asked to let go their unconscious assumption that they can represent women as a whole. The differences among women who articulate their feminist theology in many particular histories and cultures need to be fully acknowledged. A genuine globalization of women�s theologies in solidarity with each other can happen only when we dismantle the false universalisation of one group of women.

Feminist liberation theology is a human project, not an exclusively Christian project. Revisioned Christian symbols can be one cultural resource among others in a struggle for liberation that can become global only if authentically rooted in many local contexts. This is, I think, the full promise of feminist liberation theology. We are only beginning to live it, to imagine its full implications.

Rosemary Radford Ruether
(The writer is the Georgia Harkness professor of applied theology at Garret-Evangelical Theological seminary. She is on the board of Catholics for a Free choice and is editorial advisor to �Conscience�. This article is adapted from her larger work on the subject).

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