Gender and Theology

Background

Paradoxically, Christianity presents itself as a prophetic movement of liberation and belief in a new heaven and a new earth redeemed by the faithful. Yet according to sociologist Linda Woodhead, a gulf has opened up between the conservative beliefs of Christianity (which often lag behind social movements) and the consensus in the UK on issues such as gay marriage and women’s equality. This has led to an increase in the ‘no religion’ response in surveys – but ‘no religion’ doesn’t represent “no belief in God’, but may (as feminists suggest) reflect a rejection of the God-concept in traditional Christianity (Ruether), or even Christianity itself (Daly).

A word of warning though: Christianity isn’t one entity. The Montanists of the second to sixth century had women leaders and prophets, and the Quakers of the past 400 years have always followed a priestless equality where anyone can speak a word from God. Perhaps Christian forms of life (following Emporer Constantine’s conversion in 316) have become too enmeshed in the power structures of many societies to be a prophetic movement and has become a rather laggardly reflection of its times. Stanley Grenz indicates some dangers from starting with experience:

“The heart of the debate over feminist theology lies in its appeal to the feminist consciousness as its highest authority…feminist theologians run the risk of merely replacing an old ideology with a new one.” (Miller and Grenz, Contemporary Theology, p. 175.)

Mary Daly and Daphne Hampson are post-Christian feminists who reject the very basis of Christianity and the Christian God-concept. Rosemary Ruether remains a Catholic, calling the church to repent and change. Few criticisms of Christianity are as radical or far-reaching in their implications as those of the Post-Christian radical feminism, Mary Daly. Here I consider her views in her book Beyond God the Father, here contrasted with the views of the radical liberation feminist, Rosemary Ruether. Here is a summary of Sexism and God-talk.

Specification

Ruether’s discussion of the maleness of Christ and its implications for salvation including:
o Jesus’ challenge to the male warrior messiah expectation
o God as the female wisdom principle
o Jesus as the incarnation of wisdom

Daly’s claim that ‘if God is male then the male is God’ and its implications for Christianity, including:

o Christianity’s ‘Unholy Trinity’ of rape, genocide and war
o spirituality experienced through nature

Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Paul Riceour (1913-2005) asks us to adopt a HERMENEUTIC OF SUSPICION when reading a text such as the Bible. We need to be suspicious of the motives, the values, the culture of those who wrote it, and not just project our own values onto the text. As James O’Donnell comments:

“Liberation means, therefore, to opt for the exercise of an ideological suspicion in order to unmask the unconscious ideological structures which dominate and which favour a powerful, privileged minority.” (1982:32)

To understand how ancient texts function, we need to go further than just simply read it. We need to understand the context within which the story formed. There is a world behind the text (the culture of Jesus’ day) and there is a world in front  of the text, our own culture. These two horizons (Gadamer’s term) need to merge in a valid interpretation that is critical. By critical here, we mean that the worldview, the assumptions and the practices which form the understanding of the author are fully understood. To read a text entirely from our own time is to fill our reading with preconceptions. We need to fuse horizons by a critical process. Elisabeth Fiorenza puts it this way:

“We adopt a hermeneutics of suspicion – Scripture’s patriarchal authors should be analysed with critical response thereto, with a hermeneutics of remembrance – to reconstruct women’s history in Scripture that was concealed by male historical consciousness, a hermeneutics of proclamation – to assess and to evaluate Scripture theologically in order to point out its oppressive effect on women, and a hermeneutics of actualisation to recall, to embody and to celebrate women in the Bible’s achievements, suffering and struggles”. (Fiorenza 2001:174- 190).

Following in this tradition, Ruether argues that the Bible is riddled with patriarchy and emerged from a world of hierarchy with males in charge. The feminine is constructed from these patriarchal values. Part of these values, as Mary Daly agrees, involves a false set of dualisms. Men are strong, rational, and designed to lead. Women are weak, emotional and designed passively to follow, reproduce, and to serve. The social relationships are archaic, argues Ruether, and inappropriate for our time: they are reflected in a male clergy and a continued tolerance of injustice and inequality.

Behind the interpretation of the Bible, therefore, lies the acceptance of Aristotle’s biology, that sees men and women as two separate classes of human and whereby:

“The female is not only secondary and auxiliary to the male but lacks full human status in physical strength, moral self-control, and mental capacity. The lesser “nature” thus confirms the female’s subjugation to the male as her “natural” place in the universe”. (Ruether 1985:65)

Ruether’s Hermeneutic

Rosemary Ruether introduces a controlling principle – whatever denigrates women is rejected, whatever builds up and values women is accepted. Then it is experience (rather than history) which is the starting-point of theology. The Bible needs to be interpreted anew, and the story of redemption retold in the light of women’s experience of patirarchal oppression. This may be linked to the existential theology of Paul Tillich.

Rosemary Ruether argues for a golden thread within scripture, which we can rediscover if we strip away the patriarchal distortions and overlays of male values. This comprises a prophetic golden thread in the Bible which can be rediscovered and brought to the fore: emphasising justice and the call to be a new people of liberation. Isaiah 60 gives a radical vision of a just world order, and the book of Exodus is a story of liberation from slavery in Egypt across a huge divide (the Red Sea) to a new world (the Promised Land, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’).

“God’s Shekinah, Holy Wisdom, the Mother-face of God has fled from the high thrones of patriarchy and has gone into exodus with us”. Ruether

The counter-cultures of early Christianity which emphasised this were suppressed, for example, the female prophets Priscilla and Maximilla in second-century Montanism. Priscilla claimed a night vision in which Christ slept by her side “in the form of woman, clad in a bright garment”. She adopted a priestly ministry with direct voices and visions from God. Montanists were persecuted and ultimately suppressed with violence in the sixth century. As an interesting aside, it was the presence of female prophets in Corinth who claimed direct contact with the divine that may have encouraged Paul to write in his letter to Timothy, ‘women must keep silent in the church’ and “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man’. (1 Timothy 2:11-15). Paul’s radicalism in many areas seemed to stop at complete cultural revolution.

So Ruether would ask us to put the debate in context which we hear echoes of in the New Testament. Such a debate was already present in Judaism. In a fourth century BCE document, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Reuben 5 we read:

“Women are evil, my children, and by reason of their lacking authority or power over man, they scheme treacherously how they might entice him to themselves by means of their looks… . They contrive in their hearts against men, then by decking themselves out they lead men’s minds astray… . Accordingly, my children, flee from sexual promiscuity, and order your wives and your daughters not to adorn their heads and their appearances so as to deceive men’s sound minds.”

We can hear echoes of these views in St Paul’s writings, where the radicalism of his statement in Galatians (there is now ‘neither male nor female’) is tempered and distorted by concerns about church discipline and the culture of his time. Interpretation of the Bible needs to be critical: this is Ruether’s point. Her conclusion is that sexism is a sin against God/ess (her word for the divine) and against the fundamental golden thread of justice within the Bible.

“The dominant Christian tradition, if corrected by feminism, offers viable categories for interpreting human existence and building redemptive communities” Ruether

For further discussion of the feminist hermeneutic (approach to interpretation of the Bible), click here.

Ruether’s God-Concept

God/ess is the ground of all being, argues Ruether . Yet God is genderless and to turn God into the male is a form of idolatry that serves men’s interests. Mary Daly makes the same point in her criticism of the traditional doctrines of Christ’s redeeming work as scapegoat, and his incarnation in male form. She comments:

I feel that humanness is more fundamental than differences of gender, as well as other differences between humans, such as race and culture. The unity of God is an essential presupposition of the underlying unity of all humanity, the underlying unity of all creation. (Rosemary Ruether)

Moreover, in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old testament) , YAHWEH is the name of God –  and it means ‘no name’ or I AM WHO I AM. The name of God is not male, it is without gender – above and beyond gender. The word “Father’ is only a Christian word, used by Jesus himself, for example, both in a prayer (Our Father who art in heaven) and from the Cross ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”, (Luke 23:34), the seven last words of Christ. Interestingly the Aramaic Abba is closer to “Daddy’ than “Father” (Abba, Dadda).

Moreover, we can link this with debates on religious language and the attributes of Gd considered in Philosophy of Religion. Ruether argues that patriarchy encourages hierarchy with the idea and divine attribute of transcendence. So she emphasises immanence – God as being within all things. There are important links here with the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and the debate in history about whether God feels with us. The passionless, transcendent God (as argued by Calvin) is very different from the immanent suffering God explained by Moltmann in his book, the Crucified God.

In terms of God’s names, Ruether also sees God as Wisdom – the Greek word is Sophia, and the idea in wisdom literature (the Book of Wisdom is part of the Apocrypha – and so not in the Protestant Bible). This extract from the Wisdom of Solomon gives a flavour of this train of thinking – wisdom is female and presented as the ‘loving spirit’ :

For wisdom is a loving spirit; and will not acquit a blasphemer of her words: for God is witness of her reins, and a true beholder of her heart, and a hearer of her tongue.For the Spirit of the Lord fills the world: and that which contains all things has knowledge of her voice.  Wisdom reaches from one end to another with power: and sweetly she orders all things.  I loved her, and sought her out from my youth, I desired to make her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty. In that she is conversant with God, she magnifies her nobility: indeed, the Lord of all things loved her.For she is privy to the mysteries of the knowledge of God, and a lover of God’s works. (Wisdom 1: 6,7 & 8:1-4)

God/ess has sources in paganism, and Babylonian creation myths – but the mother nature idea, Ruether says, was suppressed by the early Church. We need to rediscover these ancient ideas of God if we are to follow through our critical hermeneutics of suspicion. The Bible is simply not this pure document that arrived by some mysterious process in this present form,, It was worked and reworked in history and the stories themselves inhabit a context in early Palestinian Judaism. Wisdom literature is part of this that needs to be reassessed

Can a Male Saviour Save?

Jesus gender is irrelevant according to Ruether. The maleness of Christ has no theological significance. Indeed, the Messiah is an iconoclastic (idol-smashing) prophet in the tradition of Isaiah or Amos, issuing a call to radical change and a return to the moral principle of Justice. Notice that in reinterpreting Christ Ruether departs from Daly’s analysis. Ruether argues for the essence of Christ as divine logos, whereas Daly sees the idolatry of seeing Christ as divine at all. In some ways Ruether is more dangerous to the organised churches as she is seeking to remain within the Roman Catholic church and overthrow false doctrine and patriarchal views of God. Ruether’s is a reformation – and as such she exists uneasily within a structure that seems unable or unwilling to embrace this radicalism. Perhaps for this reason, Daly disagrees with Ruether and calls us to exit the church completely. Daly is calling for a physical exodus, Ruether for a theological one in placing one value justice ad reworking Christian stories around it. Those that do not fit are then rejected (as the starting point is our horizon, and our ethical stance on gender equality).

So Ruether argues, reinforcing the point about language, that the real Jesus needs to be rediscovered and the Church should repent (meaning turn around, and change direction) and cast off patriarchal values and images. Jesus is the incarnate wisdom  of God (or LOGOS, as in John 1), full of ‘grace and truth’ but of a very different kind than the church presents and embodies with its male priests and bishops, in glorious robes and strange hats.

Such a rediscovery embraces a new relation to the earth (link with Mary Daly’s book Gyn/ecology). Feminism is, says Daly, biophilic (loves life) whereas the church she says is necrophiliac (loves death). After all the central doctrine of redemption involves a man dying horribly on a cross. This creative thinking of both theologians issues in a call to create communities of liberation who engage in the world in new ways. Ruether agrees.

The New Age and the Eschatological Community

The eschaton does not lie in the future with a second coming of Christ, eschatologically as in patriarchal ideas – beyond the grave. Here we see a link again with theological immanence (God is here now, the new community is realised here, now). the immanent God transforms, indwells, recreates now and not in some end-state outside time.

Ruether argues the eschaton is brought into being now in the redeemed community – and hence REALISED ESCHATOLOGY . The new communities are seen in hints of how the first Christians pursued a radical departure and a new lifestyle. They lived in communes and held all things in common,(Acts 2:44)  a bit like a modern kibbutz. Of course, as a synoptic point, the inerrantists we look at in religious Pluralism do not take this part of the Bible literally, preferring big houses and comfortable private cars.

Ruether believes church can be redeemed by forming new base communities with justice at their heart. Clericalism (male priesthood) is a product of patriarchy and should be rejected. Her version of community is closer to that called for after the Reformation by radicals such as the Levellers during the English Civil War. These movements too (like second century Montanism) were suppressed.

Indeed, Ruether reminds us that the early Church experiments such as Montanism had women leaders: in Acts there are two prophetesses called Priscilla and Avila, and Paul’s argument “I do not allow women to have authority in the Church” in 1 Timothy only makes sense in context of the rise of women prophets in places like Corinth, which Timothy was asked to visit, and the discord that surrounded it. The Montanist prophet Priscilla shares a name with her Biblical counterpart in Acts 18;1-3 and 2 Timothy 4:19.

Criticisms of Ruether

In a 1986 debate, Daphne Hampson makes three criticisms of Ruether’s position (acronym HIS).

1. Historical Roots of Christianity are Sexist. Ruether ignores the historically-entrenched nature of Christianity, which ‘necessarily has one foot in the past’. Incarnation means that God became a human being at a particular time, within a patriarchal worldview. That Jesus only chose male apostles may be no accident. Hampson concludes that ‘it cannot be the case that God is related in a particular way to a certain history’. Like Daly, Hampson is a post-Christian. Anthony Thiselton agrees: “Some texts, by their very nature, draw part of their meaning from the actions, history and life with which they are inextricably interwoven”; Thiselton, New Horizons of Hermeneutics, pg 6
2.  Incarnational Doctrine is sexist. God ‘sent his son’. Metaphors for God are male (with a few exceptions that are never developed). God calls Jesus ‘My Beloved Son, whom I have chosen,’ and asks Jesus’ followers to ‘listen to him’ (Luke 9:35). Christian creeds ask us to affirm belief in “Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord’. Lord and Son are both patriarchal images.
3. Symbolic world is sexist. The revelation of Chris in history is full of patriarchal symbols and messages. The Prodigal Son is having property divided between two men (Luke 15:11-35). The Good Samaritan is a male. When Jesus visits Martha and Mary, Mary is busy cooking and Martha commended for sitting passively at Jesus’ feet, (Luke 1:38-42). Women who were Resurrection witnesses were not believed because the testimony of women is unreliable. Moreover, Paul is a Rabbi and retains some of the Levitical symbolic world of Rabbinic Judaism. Hampson points out ‘we do not have stories of a man sitting at the feet of a female teacher’. When stories circulate in Corinth of women prophets, Paul seeks to suppress the upsurge by writing two letters to the Corinthians, both against women’s liberation, insisting ‘women keep silent in church’ (1 Corinthians 14:34-5).

Hampson therefore accuses Ruether of misrepresenting the profoundly historical nature of Christian patriarchy, which still affects Christian theology and practice. Hampson is a post-Christian, Ruether a Christian liberation theologian.

For an excellent chapter of a book on Rosemary Ruether click here

Mary Daly – Post-Christian Radical Feminism

Background

Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a radical lesbian feminist theologian who taught at Boston College. She almost always refused to let men into her classes, in 1999, a male student sued the school for discrimination. Daly was suspended and ultimately refused to comply. She also stated she found men disruptive. Lawrence Cunningham calls her ‘the gold standard of absolute feminism.” She calls on women to exodus the church:

“We cannot really talk about belonging to institutional religion as it exists … the women’s movement is an exodus community … we can affirm now our promise and our exodus as we walk into a future that will be our won future. … Our time has come. We will take our place in the sun. We will leave behind the centuries of silence and darkness. Let us affirm our faith in ourselves and our will to transcendence by rising and walking out together” (Daly 1993:138)

The Myths that Bolster Patriarchy

Daly argues that male myth-makers constructed an image of the feminine to mould women for their own purposes. The male is the robber who robs women of “their myths, their energy, their divinity, their very selves”. Patriarchy has ‘stolen our cosmos and turned it into Cosmopolitan magazine” and is the prevailing religion of the entire planet, whose essential message is necrophilia (love of death).

She calls women to have the courage ‘to see and to be’ and represent the greatest challenge to the religions of the world. The ultimate sin to Daly is patriarchal religion itself; yet women are complicit by living out the role of the submissive other, represented in Christianity as weak, obedient, depraved. As in Aquinas’ thought, men are superior, wise, strong, rational. The patriarchal religion, Christianity, parades a male priesthood dressed in its finery and subjugates the women to submissive roles. How can such a religion possibly liberate? She writes:

“The contrast between the arrogant bearing and colourful attire of the “princes of the church” and the humble, self-deprecating manner and sombre clothing of the very few women was appalling. Watching the veiled nuns shuffle to the altar rail to receive Holy Communion from the hands of a priest was like observing a string of lowly ants at some bizarre picnic. Speeches were read … but the voices were all male, the senile cracking whines of the men in red. … the nuns, sat docile and listened to the reading of documents in Latin, which neither they nor the readers apparently understood”. (Daly 1975:10)

The Patriarchal God

Daly maintains that the language of the Father God legitimates male supremacy and oppression of women – “as God is male the male becomes god”. The very language is the language of patriarchy and even when people don’t take this literally, the language and its gender form is used to bolster male power and domination of women. For the God-concept to be liberated, the very language of God needs to be ‘castrated’.

Furthermore, Daly links the idea to natural philosophy and the divinely-created order. Daly argues:

‘If God in “his” heaven is a father ruling “his” people, then it is in the “nature” of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated” Mary Daly

Here she identifies her central issue with Christianity. It is theological and philosophical. Notice how she takes as her criticism the entire natural law worldview that is embedded in Catholic Moral Theology following Thomas Aquinas. She is attacking the philosophical preconceptions of Catholicism itself. For Protestantism, her targets are doctrinal (incarnation and the cross) and rather more linguistic. However, she shares with Ruether the hermeneutic of suspicion – she just pushes that hermeneutic further to a rejection of Christianity in its entirety (including its Jewish roots). If God is male, she famously declared, the the male is god.

“I have already suggested that if God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination. … those which in one way or another objectify “God” as a being, thereby attempt in a self-contradictory way to envisage transcendent reality as finite. “God” then functions to legitimate the existing social, economic, and political status quo, in which women and other victimised groups are subordinate”. (Daly 1985:19).

For these reasons, theological and philosophical, Daly rejects the God-image of Christianity in favour of participation in an ultimate reality – a God-concept ‘beyond and beneath’. The image of God is the creative potential in all human beings. In this transformation of symbols of God, God is transformed from a noun (Father, Lord, King) to a verb who is “form-destroying, form-creating, transforming power that makes all things new”. God is being and becoming. Daly writes in Amazon,

“In ontological/theological language, the ultimate Final Cause is She Who Attracts. She is the Ultimate/Intimate Reality, the constantly Unfolding Verb of Verbs who is intransitive, who has no object that limits her dynamism. She is the Good who is Self-communicating, who is the Verb from whom, in whom, and with whom all true movements move. That is, She is, of course, Be-ing”. (Daly 2006:20- 21).

We might describe this as a rejection of the Christian God and a rediscovery of earlier feminine god-concepts. We could also link it to John Hick’s view of religious language and myth, and his view of universal pluralism where the name of Christ disappears altogether, to be replaced with an idea of universal divine reality. It is an inclusivist view, where there are many paths to the one divine reality.

Myth of the Feminine

Daly accuses Augustine and Aquinas of mysogyny (women hatred) as they deny women the power to reach their full potential. However, and rather paradoxically, she adopts Aquinas’ view, widely shared in the Medieval period, that God is Quintessence, or part of the highest essence of reality. This is something close to Kant’s view of the inaccessible (by sense-data) noumenal realm which inspired Hick, and which itself echoes Plato’s FORMS of the Good.

The male constructs the feminine as the originator of evil in the myth of the Fall of Humankind in Genesis 3, and its interpretations. Eve is represented as the scapegoat of male sexual guilt. Scapegoat theology is also there in the cross of Christ. Daly encourages women to enter a new Fall – a Fall into freedom, involving eating the forbidden fruit of wisdom all over again. Two images of women: the virgin and the whore, represented in the image of the pure virgin Mary, and the fallen Mary Magdalene, have been exploited and developed in patriarchal art and culture through the ages to oppress women, deny them equal rights and brainwash them into a dependent state.

MARY = the impossible virgin (still submissive to the will of the Father-God)
MARY MAGDALENE (the fallen woman) = all other women cast in the image of the fallen EVE.

The radical Daly calls women to stop playing the role of meek, subservient ‘complement’ to men, to re-imagine their power and renew the world. The pictures need to be re-painted, the images reformed.

Yet, again paradoxically, she also argues Mary can be adopted by feminism as a symbol of the autonomous woman, the first woman to fall into Paradise. She is no longer the rape-victim impregnated by God to confirm her in submission tot he divine will. Mary herself gets liberated by Daly’s thinking, and her role echoes back to a pre-Christian era of the great goddess.

The Scapegoat Christ

Just as women were scapegoated for make sexual guilt and other imperfections of this world, so Daly believes Jesus was simply a limited human being. It is idolatry to suggest a male saviour can represent the eternal being which is God. Notice how Daly departs from Ruether in this fundamental point: where Ruether elevates Christ to the cosmic eternal logos, Daly dethrones him to mere man.

Daly sees Jesus as portrayed by patriarchy as the scapegoat for the sins originating in Eve, and the twin idealisations of Christ and Mary have nothing to do with history. they are imposed on history by male gospel authors and church leaders. The projection of our evil onto these twin figures of purity (Mary and the perfect Christ)  results from an inability to accept our own guilt. Feminism rejects the scapegoat Christ with its projections of victimhood and the worship of the violence of the cross as part of the necrophilia (love of death) of patriarchy. We can also hear echoes of Freudian analysis of the subconscious and the struggle between the instincts of biophilic Eros (life instinct) and necrophiliac Thanatos (death instinct) in the human psyche.

In the development of patriarchy, the male priest becomes the sole mediator controlling access to the deity. Women need to affirm biophilia (love of life).

A Fall into the Sacred

Interpretations of the Fall in Genesis 3 make an interesting case study. It is usually interpreted as a story of how the active but easily misled woman schemes and tempts the passive Adam. Augustine takes this further ; lust enters the world after the Fall and as Genesis itself puts it ‘your desire will be for your husband and he shall rule over you’. Not only is the woman guilty of taking the fruit fo the tree, but she is responsible for her own lustful exploitation by men in our culture of porngraphy and volence against women. We are back with the false dualism of patriarchy (male/female, active/passive, rational/irrational). Women are not ‘the other’ she points out, they are equal and need to become non-conformsts. Here’s a longer quote:

‘The story of the Fall was an attempt to cope with the confusion experienced by human beings trying to make sense of the tragedy and absurdity of the human condition. Unfortunately as an exclusively male effort in a male-dominated society, it succeeded primarily in reflecting the defective social arrangements of the time.” Mary Daly

Women in exercising their freedom and power fall into a new sacred space, a second coming, escaping the false paradise of patriarchal enslavement. They practise becoming by renouncing the traditional dichotomy of HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL, which are patriarchal classifications, to live in an environment that is “beyond, beneath and all around”. Women need to change themselves from within. She writes ‘the most basic change has to take place in women – in our being and self-imagine’ – so women need to stop playing the role of victims, as passive, as accepting. One wonders what she would have made of women’s (an men’s) silence around Harvey Weinstein before his ‘outing’ by actress Rose Mc Gowan first produced an avalanche of sexual harassment claims.

Women empowered thus  cut loose from the psychosexual chains that bind them to a patriarchal set of images, and a patriarchal power structure. Women are by nature anti-church with its over-emphasis on sexual and gender differences. Women have to ‘live now the freedom we are fighting for’, and fear and guilt are no longer used as weapons of oppression. She calls both men and women to leave the church and become “an Exodus community prepared to get on with the business of living”. Indeed men may understand the manipulation of power better as they see it from within. In this way, argues Daly, and using ironic language, they become the hags, crones and witches of anew dispensation.

Notice, too, how both Ruether and Daly use the Exodus story – Ruether to develop here themes of justice, liberation and the new community comprising a golden thread in Scripture, and Daly as an image of Christians leaving the church, crossing the Red Sea of patriarchal power and prejudice, and forming anew promised land. Yet for Daly the promise is not received from a patriarchal God-figure but exists within the feminine soul, empowered by sisterhood.

‘The beginning of liberation comes when women refuse to be “good” and/or “healthy” by prevailing standards. To be female is to be deviant by definition in the prevailing culture. To be female and defiant is to be intolerably deviant. This means going beyond the imposed definitions of “bad woman” and “good woman,” beyond the categories of prostitute and wife. This is equivalent to assuming the role of witch and madwoman.’ Mary Daly

Like Ruether we have an idea here of a realised eschatology – a new order realised and lived out in time and space, now. “Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was”, she says.. Ultimately Daly believes in a new Cosmic Covenant – which renounces the old order of meaningless desires, violence and war. Hers is new age, postmodern, alternative, radical in the sense that new communities springing up of people who reject the values of the world we inhabit, with tis immoral aspects, its false visions, its own demons and its rape of nature.

Gyn/Ecology

Daly plays on words to encourage women to ‘weave tapestries of our own kind”. She rages against the oppressive system in which “patriarchy is the homeland of males” and where they oppress and demonise women in rites of suttee or witch-burning.

She analyses the language of patriarchy and the mind/body/spirit pollution this has brought about. Phallic myths predominate – from the Coca-Cola advert for the real thing to the Christian hymns glorying in the death and real presence of Christ. With spiritual pollution comes pollution of the planet – as the male ‘threatens to terminate life on the planet through rape (of nature), genocide and war’.

“If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.” (Gyn/Ecology)

To escape the enslavement and denigration of the male, argues Daly, women need to invent a new language  and set of social relations. Using creative anger  and brilliant bravery, women rediscover ‘our women-loving love”. “We find our original Being and we spin our original integrity” and so put power  and joy back into living. Notice how we are back where the Greeks began: the debate about the virtues that build the eudaimonic life, and the foundation virtue of courage. Without courage you cannot build integrity. Without courage you will never struggle against Harvey Weinstein or other apologists for male power and exploitation of women.

On contraception she comments, showing her pkayful use of language: “It is obvious to Hags that few gynaecologists recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolproof of solutions, namely Misterectomy. The Spinsters who propose this way by our be-ing, liv-ing, speak-ing can do so with power precisely because we are not preoccupied with ways to get off the heterosexually defined contraceptive dilemma.” (Gyn/ecology p.239)

Can a Male Saviour Save?

In Chapter 3 of Beyond God the Father, Daly addresses issues surrounding the incarnation of Christ in the gender of a male. She argues for crucial underlying assumption:

“The underlying – and often explicit – assumption in the minds of theologians down through the centuries is that the deity could not have deigned to “become incarnate” in the “inferior sex”. Mary Daly

She sees it as irrelevant whether Jesus chose women disciples like Mary Magdalene or whether he would have spoused radical feminism. The image of Christ as portrayed in Scripture as a male, patriarchal image. Jesus’ gender is relevant because Jesus is the subject – and women are portrayed as passive recipients of Christ’s blessings. The Bible is, she argues, a partial account becuase women’s roles are defined already by the writers of the Bible (presumably, men). She would agree with Daphne Hampson that the whole narrative is riddled with patriarchy – in its assumptions and in its plot.

We also see how the church in history even worked out elements of the plot: one hint of Mary being a virgin (possible translation, ‘maiden’) in just one gospel, Matthew, becomes reformed into a whole doctrine of the pure Virginin contrast Eve had the lustful tarnishment of sexual relations with Adam. As Jesus had brothers, Matthew 13:55, Joseph, Jude, James and Simon, (one of them, James, wrote a letter in the New testament and is thought to have become a leader fo the early church), it is unclear how Mary’s purity could have been maintained for long.

Can a male saviour save? Certainly not, as the whole doctrine of incarnation is a a gender-biased account of how God entered the world, which is used to boost the dominance of men. It is also an idolatrous idea, as recognised in Islam, as God cannot have a human form. The divine reality is beyond us. Here is an article evaluating Mary Daly’s view.

Criticisms of Daly

Black theologian Audrew Lorde criticised Daly for refusing to acknowledge the ‘HERSTORY and myth’ of women of colour (read her letter here). The severe oppression they have suffered greatly outweighs the discrimination of white women. There’s a racial bias to Daly’s work and a racist indifference to the plight of minorities who suffer greatest oppression.

“Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply invisible as a Black lesbian feminist” (Lorde 1984:40).

Patriarchy cannot assist in explaining why only a few men in a patriarchy use violence against women and why many males have campaigned for women’s rights over the centuries (the first man being Jesus himself who overthrew aspects of anti-women purity code of  Leviticus). Daly wanted women to rule men and was herself a lesbian and vegetarian. “I really don’t care about men” she commented in an interview. Yet isn’t this perpetuating the DUALISM she herself rejects as oppressive?

The framework of Patriarchy is assumed in all instances. There is no other explanation given for witch-burning (Christian) or suttee (Hindu). Paradoxically, Enlightenment enquiry provoked an upsurge of interest in alchemy and other forms of magic: it is arguably the flip-side of the stress on autonomous reason. James I wrote a book on witches.

People who criticise her thesis are described as “fembots doing Daddy’s work”.there is no analysis of class, wealth or race as instruments of oppression of women.

See Daphne Hampson and Criticisms of Ruether and Daly

Confusions to Avoid

Feminists cannot be Christians. Feminists like Ruether argue that Christianity can be restored to a lost prophetic movement, transforming society, but only if patriarchy is rejected. A male saviour is irrelevant to salvation and the male perspective is a gloss overlaying the true gospel, which can be reconstructed as a gospel of liberation and hope. However, both Daphne Hampson and Mary Daly call women out of the church and see Christianity as irredeemably patriarchal. They are post-Christian feminists.

The Church has no response to feminism. This isn’t a fair assessment because the Protestant churches have reformed themselves and allowed women priests and bishops (where appropriate to their order of ministry). The Church of England ordained women priests in 1993 and women Bishops in 2013. The Roman Catholic Church produced a brave apologetic for its position in not allowing women priests and bishops in Mulieris Dignitatem, which lay great emphasis on the equality of the sexes, but failed to reconcile the contradiction in the Bible between the Paul of Galatians (there is neither male nor female) and the Paul of Ephesians and Corinthians (wives obey your husbands, and “I do not allow women to have authority over a man’). Moreover, the Catholic persistence in advocating the RHYTHM method of contraception arguably suggests that the AUTONOMY of women and their right to choose is still being overridden by the male perspective.

A male saviour cannot save. This extreme position, taken by Mary Daly, would appear to overlook the revolutionary attitude of Jesus towards women whom he included in his inner circle and addressed as equals – “daughter, your faith has made you well, go in peace” (Mark 5 Jesus’ words to the bleeding woman who touches him). Arguably when Jesus ’emptied himself taking the form of a servant’ (Philippians 2:7), he also gave up the genderless infinity of God (Yahweh – means ‘I am who I am’). God cannot have a gender and so if Jesus is one with God his gender must be irrelevant for salvation. Messiah is a genderless idea. Emphasis on the gender of Christ and the virginity of Mary comes later as the male-dominated church hierarchy produces creeds which impose uniformity on belief and cast out so-called heretics, such as the Montanists.

Possible Exam Questions

1. ‘ A male saviour cannot save’. Discuss with reference to the theologies of Rosemary Ruether and Mary Daly.
2. “if God is male the male is God’. Discuss
3. Critically contrast the theologies of Ruether and Daly.
4. “The Church is irrevocably patriarchal’. Discuss
5. “God is genderless, and so the idea of the Father-God is idolatry”. Discuss
6. “Only a spirituality of women can save the planet from environmental degradation and war’. Discuss

Reading

Listen to Mary Daly interview https://archive.org/details/KDVS_The_Fringe_4-5-06

Rosemary Ruether in http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Rosemary_Radford_Ruether

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father

Mary Daly Can a Male Saviour Save? Peped.org/extract/feminism/Daly

Daphne Hampson, After Christianity (2002)

O’Donnell, James

Paul Ricoeur Herneneutics

Rosemary Ruether Sexism and God-talk

Bible Passages such as 2 Corinthians 11:3 and 1 Tim 2:14 became the argument for the subordination of women and Mark 5 and John 8 for Jesus’ more liberating attitudes to women. Isaiah 60 gives the prophetic call for justice. Paul in Galatians 3:16 seems to contradict Ephesians 5. Can they be reconciled?

Hampson, in her book After Christianity, 2002, states that if Christianity is true, God cannot be thought of as moral or good “given the harm that this myth has done to women” (Hampson 2002:xv). The Christian myth is misogynistic (Hampson 2002:xvi) and morally suspect (Hampson 2002:vxiii).

Schüssler Fiorenza once stated that theology is the product of each writer’s experience and that this is determined by the historical and social context of every theologian. Theology is culturally conditioned and contextually shapes, reflects, and serves a particular group’s or individual’s interests (Fiorenza 1975:616).

The creation of patriarchal concepts, according to Lerner (1993:3), was built into all mental constructs of societies and remained invisible over the centuries. These concepts projected men as whole and powerful and females as deviant, incomplete, physically mutilated and emotionally dependent. This understanding was founded on the fact that men and women were created differently, and therefore their biology, respective needs, capacities and functions are not the same (Lerner 1993:4). In a patriarchal society, men are viewed as naturally superior, stronger and more rational whereas women are viewed as naturally weaker, intellectually and rationally inferior, emotionally unstable and incapable of being involved in politics (Lerner 1993:4).

Bible Passages such as 2 Corinthians 11:3 and 1 Tim 2:14 became the argument for the subordination of women