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midrash = Hebrew biblical commentary
kenosis = the renunciation of the divine nature in the incarnation
eschatology = the doctrine of the last or final things such as death, the judgment, the future state, etc.
ontology = the branch of metaphysics that investigates the nature of being and of the first principles involved
1. Feminist Theology: Methodology, Sources, and Norms
2. Sexism and God-Language: Male and Female Images of
the Divine
3. Woman, Body, and Nature: Sexism and the Theology of
Creation
4. Anthropology: Humanity as Male and Female
5. Christology: Can a Male Savior Save Women?
6. Mariology as Symbolic Ecclesiology: Repression or Liberation?
7. The Consciousness of Evil: The Journeys of Conversion
8. Ministry and Community for a People Liberated from Sexism
9. The New Earth: Socioeconomic Redemption from Sexism
10. Eschatology and Feminism
Postscript: Woman/Body/Nature: The Icon of the Divine
1. Feminist Theology: Methodology, Sources, and Norms
1) "The critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of woman is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive. Theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption." pages 18-19
2) "Thus all theologies, regardless of their claims that the Bible is totally the work of inspiration, in fact never consider all parts of the Bible equally authoritative; rather they use texts according to implicit or explicit assumptions about the normative development of Biblical faith." page 23
3) "Prophetic faith denounces religious ideologies and systems that function to justify and sanctify the dominant, unjust social order." page 24
4) "In both Testaments, this prophetic critique of society also implies a critique of religion." page 26
5) "But Jesus criticized the temptation to see this simply as a reversed system of domination and privilege. Rather, he pressed beyond the critique of the present order to a more radical vision, a revolutionary transformative process that will bring all to a new mode of relationship.
In God's Kingdom the corruption principles of domination and subjugation will be overcome. People will no longer model social or religious relationships, or even relationships to God, after the sort of power that reduces others to servility." page 30
2. Sexism and God-Language: Male and Female Images of the Divine
1) "But the parent model for the divine has negative resonance as well. It suggests a kind of permanent parent-child relationship to God. God becomes a neurotic parent who does not want us to grow up. To become autonomous and responsible for our lives is the gravest sin against God. Patriarchal theology uses the parent image for God to prolong spiritual infantilism as virtue and to make autonomy and assertion of free will a sin. Parenting in patriarchal society also becomes the way of enculturing us to the stereotypic male and female roles." page 70
3. Woman, Body, and Nature: Sexism and the Theology of Creation
1) "The establishment of this relationship between male and female spheres depends not only on males as definers of culture but also on the burdening of women with most of the tedious, day-to-day tasks of economic production. Males become a leisure class with relatively little to do but decorate themselves, sharpen their weapons, and prepare for the occasional great excursions of hunting and war. Confining some women to ornamental status is the luxury of a male aristocratic elite. The domination of women throughout most of human history has depended on the freeing of males for cultural control by filling women's day with most of the tasks of a domestic production and reproduction." page 74
2) "Moreover, male culture symbolizes control over nature in ambivalent ways. The later priestly creation story of Genesis 1 may command Adam to "fill the earth and subdue it," but the earlier folkloric story of Paradise (Gen. 2-3) pictures a time of dependence on a fruitful earth that gave of itself without human labor. The human effort to control and define one's own life is seen as a revolt against dependence on God, precipitated by woman and resulting in a loss of the earth as a spontaneously reproductive paradise. Work, intervention, and struggle to control nature is the curse to which man is now confined. Woman is punished for her role by being subjugated to man. Male culture compensates for the sin of intervention in nature by picturing obedience to ultimate reality as abnegation of control, as "childlike dependence" on a power that controls and defines man." page 76
3) "This biological tendency has been exaggerated by socialization into dominant and subordinate social roles. Dominant social roles exaggerate linear, dichotomized thinking and prevent the development of culture that would correct this bias by integrating the relational side. Women and other subordinate groups, moreover, have had their rational capacities suppressed through denial of education and leadership experience and so tend to be perceived as having primarily intuitive and affective patterns of thought. Thus socialization in power and powerlessness distorts integration further and creates what appears to be dichotomized personality cultures of men and women, that is, masculinity and femininity." page 90
4. Anthropology: Humanity as Male and Female
1) "Within history, woman's subjugation is both the reflection of her inferior nature and the punishment for her responsibility for sin." page 95
2) "Eschatological feminism insists on equality in the Church, for the Church belongs not to the world but to the transcendent sphere of redemption. But eschatological feminism has no message of equality of women in the world. As long as women remain in sexual and procreational relationship, they are necessarily subjugated to patriarchal domination. The message of equality in Christ does not invite women to change the world but to leave it, to adopt the redeemed lifestyle and enter the spiritual community that is preparing for the end of the world and transcendent life in Heaven." page 101
3) Regarding liberal feminism: "Liberalism secularizes the doctrine of the imago dei. The equivalence of male and female refers to the actual capacities of men and women as finite, historical persons. Whence then comes patriarchy and the distortion of equality into domination and subjugation? Liberalism interprets this not as a fall into bodily, finite existence but as a fall into injustice. Historical injustice has distorted the original equivalence of all human beings and has created instead hierarchical societies of privilege and deprivation, domination and exploitation. The common rights of all persons to property and to participation in the government have been distorted into inherited privileges of the few based on false concepts of innate superiority. The rest of humanity- lower classes, nonwhite races, and women - have been deprived of their human rights and reduced to subjugation.
The process of redemption also is secularized. It no longer represents an escape from history and ordinary human potential into a transcendent sphere. Rather, it points to a new historical future to be achieved through social reform or revolution that overthrows the unjust order of privilege and exploitation. The equivalent human nature of all persons, while suppressed in this unjust history, is still available as a norm to guide the new reformed society. Equality of women is not a "reform against nature" but a reform mandated by nature itself." page 103
4) Regarding romantic feminism: "Romanticism comes close to reversing the traditional patriarchal correlation of imago dei and fallen humanity with spiritual maleness and carnal femaleness. Instead it is the female who represents, in a purer and less ambiguous way, the original goodness of humanity as imago dei. This does not mean that men do not also possess this good human nature originally. But because they have to enter the sphere of power, competition, and sin, the good human nature becomes obscured in men.
Men, as makers of history, take on the nature of historical humanity characterized by force and domination. Women, as those forbidden to enter the sphere of force and domination, retain more of the original purity and goodness of human nature. Women, shielded from history, are less fallen than men. They are more capable of altruistic, loving, self-giving life, less prone to the sins of egoism that are a sinful but necessary part of historical existence." page 105
5) Regarding conservative romanticism: "Conservative romanticism correlates the sphere of altruism, purity, and love with the home and the realm of pride, egoism, and sin with the public sphere of politics, war, and work. Woman, although ideally the exponent of a higher, more loving humanity, possesses this good nature only in a fragile and vulnerable way. She can preserve her goodness only by the strictest segregation in the home, by eschewing all participation in the realm of public power. If woman leaves the home to take up a traditional male occupation, she will straightway lose the good femininity and become a she-male, a monstrous virago, or will become debased to carnal femaleness, fallen woman." pages 105-106
6) Regarding reformist romanticism: "Reformist romanticism agrees with conservative romanticism in the belief in woman's purer and less ambiguous nature and its correlation with her role as nurturer of husband and children in the home. Unlike conservative romanticism, it takes more literally the view of the good nature of woman as innate rather than as something woman might lose if she enters the sphere of power. Reformist romanticism shares with liberalism the belief that the higher nature of humanity can be a basis for reform of social institutions rather than just a call to escape from them into a separate and more spiritual sphere. For reformist feminism, the bourgeois ideal of the family is seen as a launching pad for a mission into the world to uplift and transform it to the higher standards of goodness, peace, and loving service of womanhood and the home." pages 106-107
7) Regarding radical romanticism: "Radical romanticism despairs of reforming ambiguous and evil male institutions. By implication it also is more pessimistic about the possibilities of converting male nature to female goodness. Rather, it repudiates male culture (including patriarchal religion) and withdraws into the female sphere as a separatist enclave of female values. It seeks to convert this female sphere from a dependent appendage to the male world of politics, war, and work into a self-sufficient utopian community. Here the higher female qualities of love, relatedness, and mutuality can reign unimpeded by ambiguous male institutions." page 108
8) "Androgyny refers to the possession by both males and females of both halves of the psychic capacities that have been traditionally separated as masculinity and femininity." page 111
5. Christology: Can a Male Savior Save Women?
1) "But here it suffices to note that Jesus seems to express a radicalized view of the concept of a coming Reign of God as a time of the vindication of the poor and the oppressed. The poor and the oppressed are not seen in nationalist terms as Israel, but rather as marginalized groups and classes within the Jewish world of his day." page 120
2) "Jesus' vision of the Kingdom is neither nationalistic nor other-worldly. The coming Reign of God is expected to happen on earth, as the Lord's Prayer makes evident (God's Kingdom come, God's will be done on earth.) It is a time when structures of domination and subjugation have been overcome, when the basic human needs are met (daily bread), when all dwell in harmony with God and each other (not led into temptation but delivered from evil). Although it will certainly be a great revolution in human affairs, it will come about as a divine response to human repentance. It is the people of Israel specifically who must repent the systems of fossilized religious righteousness and class oppression that have distorted the vision of God's mercy and promises." page 120
3) "Fundamentally, Jesus renews the prophetic vision whereby the Word of God does not validate the existing social and religious hierarchy but speaks on behalf of the marginalized and despised groups of society. Jesus proclaims an iconoclastic reversal of the system of religious status: The last shall be first and the first last. The leaders of the religious establishment are blind guides and hypocrites. The outcasts of society - prostitutes, publicans, Samarians - are able to hear the message of the prophet. This reversal of social order doesn't just turn hierarchy upside down, it aims at a new reality in which hierarchy and dominance are overcome as principles of social relations.
Jesus revises God-language by using the familiar Abba for God. He speaks of the Messiah as servant rather than king to visualize new relations between the divine and the human. Relation to God no longer becomes a model for dominant-subordinate relations between social groups, leaders, and the led. Rather, relation to God means we are to call no man "Father, Teacher, or Master" (Matt. 23:1-12) Relation to God liberates us from hierarchical relations and makes us all brothers-sisters of each other. Those who would be leaders must become servants of all.
Women play an important role in this Gospel vision of the vindication of the lowly in God's new order. It is the women of the oppressed and marginalized groups who are often pictured as the representatives of the lowly. The dialogue at the well takes place with a Samaritan woman. A Syro-Phoenician woman is the prophetic seeker who forces Jesus to concede redemption of the Gentiles. Among the poor it is the widows who are the most destitute. Among the ritually unclean, it is the woman with the flow of blood who extorts healing for herself contrary to the law. Among the morally outcast, it is the prostitutes who are furthest from righteousness. The role played by women of marginalized groups is an intrinsic part of the iconoclastic, messianic vision. It means that the women are the oppressed of the oppressed. They are the bottom of the present social hierarchy and hence are seen, in a special way, as the last who will be first in the Kingdom of God." pages 135-137
4) "He [Jesus] speaks to and is responded to by low-caste women because they represent the bottom of this status network and have the least stake in its perpetuation." page 137
6. Mariology as Symbolic Ecclesiology: Repression or Liberation?
1) Regarding male and female gods in Canaan: "The Canaanite conception of this divine love made the lovers equals. . . . If this is an analogy of divine-human love, it fundamentally disrupts the hierarchical pattern of divine-human and male-female relations." page 140
2) "Social iconoclasm plays a key role in Luke's understanding of God's redemptive work. Luke stresses stories of divine favor and forgiveness on classes of people who are despised by the wealthy, powerful, and traditionally religious. Jesus eats with sinners and gives favor to publicans. The good Samaritan and the rich man and Lazarus also make the point that those reviled by society express true faith and find favor with God." page 156
7. The Consciousness of Evil: The Journeys of Conversion
1) "Feminism represents a fundamental shift in the valuations of good and evil. It makes a fundamental judgment upon some aspects of past descriptions of the nature and etiology of evil as themselves ratifications of evil." page 160
2) "The element of projection leads to irrationalities that exceed merely the self-interest of the dominant group. Genocidal campaigns, witch-hunts, and pogroms go beyond self-interest of the powerful into a fantasy realm in which the dominant group imagines that by purging society of the "other" it can, in some sense, eradicate "evil."
Feminists, in rejecting this kind of naming of evil, are at the same time suggesting that evil does exist, precisely in this false naming, projection, and exploitation. This very process of false naming and exploitation constitutes the fundamental distortion and corruption of human relationality. Evil comes about precisely by the distortion of the self-other relationship into the good-evil, superior-inferior dualism. The good potential of human nature then is to be sought primarily in conversion to relationality." page 163
3) "Among the primary distortions of the self-other relationship has been the distortion of humanity as male and female into a dualism of superiority and inferiority. This is fundamentally a male ideology and has served two purposes: the support for male identity as normative humanity and the justification of servile roles for women." page 165
4) "The Hebrew myth of Eve has had much greater cultural impact than that of Pandora, since Christian theology has understood it to be divine revelation and hence has taken this rather odd folk tale with consummate theological seriousness. It is perhaps not insignificant to note that Hebrew thought itself, in the Scriptures and early Rabbinic writings, did not take this story very seriously. Although it appears as one creation story in the early Genesis material, it is never referred to at any other place in Hebrew Scripture as the basis of the etiology of evil. For Judaism, the primary myth of evil lies in the story of God's election of Israel and its subsequent apostasy from God by seeking idols. It is this drama of good and evil, and not the Eve story, that shapes Hebrew thought. . . .
The Gospels likewise ignore the Eve story as the basis of the origin of evil. They share the late Jewish world view in which human decision making, for good or evil, is surrounded by powerful demonic influences that tip the balance to the negative side. But the etiology of the demonic power is not spelled out.
Hence, it is Pauline theology, with its dualism of Old and New Adam, that lays the basis for a new theological seriousness toward the story of Adam's fall. In the post-Pauline epistle 1 Timothy, Eve's secondary position in creation and primacy in sin are used to justify the resubjugation of women in the Christian Church. Pauline theology raises the problem of sin to a dimension unknown in Judaism. While Judaism recognizes an element of collective historical evil as cosmic powers that pull humans to bad choices, it presumes that human freedom to choose good over evil remains fundamentally intact.
Pauline theology, as it came to be interpreted by Augustine and his successors, saw the Adamic fall as obliterating human freedom to choose good. Humans become alienated from their own good human potential, which must be given back to them as a gift through the Crucifixion of Christ. Thus, the scapegoating of Eve as the cause of the fall of Adam makes all women, as her daughters, guilty for the radical impotence of "man" in the face of evil, which is paid for only by the death of Christ!" page 166
My note: If there was no fall, no resurrection was needed to redeem humankind; without a redeemer, Christianity has no reason to exist. Seems like the church has a powerful financial, social, and political motive for dreaming up and continuing to preach "The Fall" - and if the church changes the reason for requiring a redeemer (for example, by blaming the introduction of sin into the world on the kiss of a toad as opposed to Eve eating an apple), then the church's credibility on all issues is questioned and the church stands to show that all of its dogma is just that, dogma.
6) "Stories like the myth of Eve also enforce the continued repression and subjugation of woman, as "punishment" for her primordial "sin" in causing the fall of "man" and the loss of paradise. Because women re in fact not inferior, but full human persons of equivalent capacities upon whom all males, as children, were once dependent, the task of suppressing women into dependence on males is a never-ending struggle. It is not a "coup" accomplished once upon a time in some mysterious victory of patriarchy at the dawn of history. It must be reiterated generation after generation, by repeating the myths of woman's original sin to the young, both male and female, and by reinforcing laws and structures that marginalize women from power roles in society. Even then the task is not accomplished. Wives show an alarming lack of submission, an irrepressible tendency to assert shreds of autonomy and resistance. The whole range of coercive techniques, from brute force to contempt and ridicule to artful blandishments, is necessary to keep her in her "place." Religion is relied upon as both the foundation and the daily aid in this project.
New myths and methods of terrorizing women into keeping their place are invented to suppress or eliminate those women who have somehow escaped becoming sufficiently docile to their own servitude." pages 169-170
7) Regarding witchcraft accusations in Puritan new England: "Thus, the group of women most at risk of persecution were women who, in one of several ways, fell outside the normative role of the "goodwife": they were personally and economically independent and they were no longer fulfilling the roles of wife and mother, but managing their own affairs independently." page 172
8) "The recognition of sexism as wrong, evil, and sinful brings about the total collapse of the myths of female evil. . . . Every aspect of male privilege loses its authority as natural and divine right and is reevaluated as sin and evil." page 173
9) "Whether it is women, land, or ideas, the normal male mode of relationship is one of conquer or be conquered, dominate or be dominated. The "other" is obliterated or reduced to an object of control. " page 179
10) "[Female] Consciousness is much more of a collective social product than modern individualism realizes. No one can affirm an idea against the dominant culture unless there is at least a subcultural group that gives people both the ideas and the social support for an alternative position. The dominant ideology and social order have to have become weakened and discredited enough that such countercultural groups can build up their position and survive." page 184
11) "The woman who experiences dissenting thoughts alone, without any network of communication to support her, can hardly bring her own dissent to articulation. Without a social matrix, she will simply be terrorized into submission by the authorities that surround her or acquiesce in their judgment that she is a "witch" of a "madwoman." Only where there is a feminist movement that has been able to survive, to develop networks of communication, and to provide some alternative vision of life is feminist consciousness a real possibility." pages 184-185
12) "Thus, for men as well as women, conversion means a receiving of a grounded self that not only repudiates male group egoism but also overcomes the passivity that acquiesces to the group ego." page 191
8. Ministry and Community for a People Liberated from Sexism
1) "Women in ministry, like all women trying to function in public roles under male rules, find themselves in a double bind. They are allowed success only by being better than men at the games of masculinity, while at the same time they are rebuked for having lost their femininity. In such a system it is not possible for women to be equal, but only to survive in a token and marginal way at tremendous physical and psychological cost." page 201
2) "Feminist liberation communities necessarily must dismantle clericalism, which is an understanding of leadership as rule that reduces others to subjects to be governed." page 206
3) "Ministry transforms leadership from power over others to empowerment of others." page 207
4) "Even in the most clerical material in the Pastoral Epistles, the office of bishop is designated as teaching, not as administration of sacraments." page 209
5) "Whether we gather in living rooms, warehouses, or church buildings, the marks of the authentic Church are the same. The Church is where the good news of liberation from sexism is preached, where the Spirit is present to empower us to renounce patriarchy, where a community committed to the new life of mutuality is gathered together and nurtured, and where the community is spreading this vision and struggle to others." page 213
9. The New Earth: Socioeconomic Redemption from Sexism
1) "Liberal Feminism has its roots in a feminist appropriation of the liberal traditions of equal rights, rooted in the doctrine of a common human nature of all persons." page 216
2) Regarding Socialist Feminist: "Then [under socialism] women, along with men, as workers, would have an equal share in the fruits of their productive labor. Under these conditions, women as independent wage earners would be able to relate to men as equal partners, both on the job and within marriage." page 224
3) "For radical feminism the core issue is women's control over their own persons, their own bodies as vehicles of autonomous sexual experience, and their own reproduction. . . . Any theory of women's liberation that stops short of liberating women from male control over their bodies has not reached the root of patriarchy." page 228
1) Regarding nature religion: "In Babylonian thought there is an idea of a shadowy underworld or kingdom of the dead, but it is hardly a blessed or ideal existence. It is the realm where the dead are held in a tenuous existence by the commemoration of their living descendants. The dead hold on to this shadowy life through the veneration offered them by their families. . . . . The basic thought of Babylonian religion, however, is that human beings are fundamentally mortal. Death is their portion. . . She [an alewife in the epic] advises Gilgamesh to eat, drink, and be merry, marry and enjoy the fruits of relationship with wife and child, and give up the futile search for life beyond death." page 241
2) Regarding historical religion [Judaism]: "One discerns in the signs of the times military defeats or unexpected restorations, the hand of God working in history. The people's apostasy or fidelity to God is the fulcrum that turns the course of history from divine wrath to divine blessing." page 243
3) Regarding eschatological religion: "By the later Persian and Hellenistic periods, Jewish thought begins to incorporate ideas of an immediate judgment of the soul after death and of a foretaste of punishment or blessings." page 244
4) "Each great social movement, such as the labor movement or the women's movement, leaves undone some needed changes and generates other contradictions over time. It is left to the new generation to undertake the project of a just and viable life for its time. But it is the responsibility of the present generation to create and preserve the base of a livable world that makes such a project possible for its descendants." page 255
Postscript: Woman/Body/Nature: The Icon of the Divine
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