Toward a Total Human Theology

Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. By Mary Daly. Beacon Press, 1973. $8.95 ($3.95, paperback).

A Different Heaven and Earth: A Feminist Perspective on Religion. By Sheila D. Collins. Judson Press, 1974. $8.95 (also available in paperback).

Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective--A Theology. By Letty M. Russell. The Westminster Press, 1974. $3.95, paperback.

Man as Male and Female: A Study in Sexual Relationships from a Theological Point of View. By Paul K. Jewett. Eerdmans, 1975. $2.95, paperback.

New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. The Sea-bury Press, 1975. $8.95.

Classical theology in all of its forms and most contemporary theologies are thoroughly sexist. Ignoring the multiplicity of images used to reveal God in scripture and the explicit command against idolatrous images, Christian theology has by and large absolutized masculine images of God and a sexist interpretation of scripture in order to provide a rationale for the patriarchal status quo of Western society.

For example, Clark Pinnock’s essay on “An Evangelical Theology of Human Liberation” in the February issue of Sojourners illustrated such traditional thinking. Pinnock defined God in terms of “Father” and “Son” and referred to the Spirit (feminine in Hebrew and neuter in Greek) by the masculine pronoun at least four times. He used masculine pronouns exclusively through out the essay, 27 times for God, to say nothing of the 23 times he reminded us of Jesus' “masculinity.” Neither the half of the human race which is female nor any feminine spiritual images were mentioned.

Many people today are trying to articulate a theology which is more than an ideology for the ruling class, one that is good news to both oppressed and oppressor. Black theologies have excoriated the sin of racism and offered a gospel of hope to black people. Third World liberation theologies stress the gospel’s condemnation of the rich and concern for the poor. One would expect “feminist theologies” to denounce the sin of sexism and to glorify the “feminine experience” (after all, it would only be fitting retaliation for the church “fathers” who told us for centuries that true salvation was to be found only in becoming “male” and “manly”).

But the feminist theologians represented by the best of these books are not concerned with duplicating past theological models which supported a few human beings and oppressed the rest. They attempt to speak to the total human situation. They find sexism the primary category for sin and oppression simply because gender distinctions were the first to be made and distorted (read Genesis 1, 2, and 3, where verse declares domination of man over woman to be one of the first results of sin). From that division stems an ever-widening rift: between human beings and the earth; between “Abel a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the ground”; between Isaac the progenitor of the “chosen people” and Ishmael who was rejected; between Jew and Greek, slave and free, Pharisee and sinner, spirit and flesh, priest and people, Christian and Jew, self and the Other, white and black, rich and poor, the West and the Third World. Ruether in particular analyzes how the dualisms of patriarchal Christian theology have been used against women, witches, Jews, and blacks. What these theologians are attempting to do is to find a theology of wholeness beyond duality -- for all people.

Foundational to feminist theologizing is the work of Mary Daly. With doctorates in both theology and philosophy, Daly is in some ways the most radical of the lot. Her work has been ridiculed and damned -- a sure sign that the questions she is asking are too threatening for most people to take seriously. Her 1968 work The Church and the Second Sex (reprinted in 1975 as a Harper Colophon Book, $3.45, paperback, with a “New Feminist Post-christian Introduction by the Author”) provided a thorough critique of the historic church, the Tradition. In Beyond God the Father she destroys more central idols: “God the Father,” “Original sin,” the male Jesus, and “phallic morality.”

Although Daly calls herself “post-christian” and says she is doing philosophy not theology, she is still concerned with such basic questions as the nature of God, revelation, sin, salvation. In a review for Christianity Today once I was asked to omit a quotation from Daly calling God a “Verb.” But her criticism of traditional theology is precisely that it has anthropomorphized God through the use of nouns. And after all, when Moses asked for a name, God replied: “I Am” (Exodus 6:2), the verb-name claimed by Jesus in John 8:58. Daly’s point, and what I take to be a major point in scripture, is that God cannot be “captured” in any name, noun, image, metaphor.

In doing theology one must first choose one’s resources. Daly and many others (see Religion and Sexism, a collection of essays edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Simon and Schuster, 1974, $3.95, paperback) have amply demonstrated that the Judeo-Christian tradition is permanently warped by sexism. Theology in the past has been an attempt to interpret scripture with the help of current philosophy and cultural patterns (e.g., Augustine interpreted scripture in neo-Platonic categories in an empire which was falling apart; Aquinas read the Bible in the light of a revived Aristotelianism amid medieval society). Few feminists have been self-critical of their own philosophical pre-suppositions, but they certainly are skeptical about what use can be made of the Bible.

Feminist theology raises questions about the meaning of scripture and the nature of revelation at the deepest levels. Crucial to the enterprise is the distinction between scripture itself (what it says) and interpretation (what men have said it says and means). Or to put it into a specific question: is scripture opposed to full personhood for women or has it simply been interpreted that way in order to buttress patriarchal systems? Daly says, maybe “Jesus was a feminist, but so what?” Scriptural symbols may be said to have liberating possibilities, but historically they have not had such power and thus must be inherently deficient.

Jewett has come under considerable attack from establishment evangelicals not because he advocates a feminist position but because of his treatment of scripture. His trouble stems, it seems to me, from his difficulty at this very point. He has chosen to accept as accurate the most sexist interpretations of certain Pauline passages concerning women (one assumes, though there is no evidence of it in his footnotes, that Jewett has read the wealth of scholarship over the centuries suggesting alternate and less sexist interpretations) and then to simply set them aside. He finds in the New Testament two perspectives which are “incompatible” and declares that “there is no satisfying way to harmonize” them (pp. 112-113). (Before one gets too upset about this one should remember that Luther had similar difficulty over Paul’s view of faith in contrast to James teaching on works).

But even if one can find satisfying ways to harmonize scripture on this issue (and I personally believe it can be done at least in the New Testament), one does have to examine one’s view of inspiration. For the most part God did accommodate revelation to the limitations of human language as understood by specific men with distinct cultural biases (“Cretans are always liars,” Titus 1:12-13). That portion of scripture which purports to come most directly from the mouth of God, even the most fundamentalist disregards (the Levitical taboos, dietary laws and animal sacrifices). The Bible was clearly written by males in patriarchal cultures. Those elements of scripture which reflect this bias must be read for what they are and not absolutized. One does not deny the inspiration of scripture when one either disputes a traditional interpretation of a passage or declares a passage less than relevant to one’s own cultural situation (e.g., the numerous passages concerning slaves are not particularly relevant to a society which has abolished slavery).

Russell, Jewett, and Ruether each take an essentially positive view of the Bible. All find bases in it for theological reflection. Russell, for example, reminds us that “salvation” includes the Old Testament concept of “shalom,” peace, in a deep, corporate sense, as well as individual reconciliation with God. Jewett bases his hermeneutic on the equality found in original creation (Genesis 1:27-28) and in the kingdom norms practiced by Jesus and articulated by Paul in such verses as Galatians 3:28. Ruether points in the same direction when in her chapter on ordination she notes that the church has aped worldly socio-political patterns of hierarchy in its leadership while Jesus clearly taught that leadership was synonymous with servanthood (Matthew 20:25-28; 23:8-11). She goes on to call Paul “a theological radical but, at least provisionally, a social conservative.” Paul did at times reinforce the present orders of creation while at the same time calling them demonic and expecting their imminent destruction at the second coming. He never meant, says Ruether, to “absolutize the status quo of a sexist, class, and slave society” (pp. 68-69).

Scripture is never the sole source of one’s theology. One draws on a variety of resources. Sheila Collins follows the lead of Daly in discarding scripture and tradition as “too jaded by the necessities of masculine culture to be able to be the bearer of truth” (p. 40). She tries to find another tradition, that of the matriarchy, in such works as J. J. Bachofen’s Myth, Religion and the Mother Right, Helen Diner’s Mothers and Amazons, Elizabeth Gould Davis' The First Sex, E. O. James' The Cult of the Mother Goddess, and Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess. Ruether also offers a helpful analysis of this material. More study needs to be made in this area, particularly in terms of how it relates to the biblical portrayal of God. While veneration of the Great Goddess, which some feminists advocate, may seem heretical to most Christians, it is no further from truth than worshiping a male God as we have been taught to do. A more radical and valid approach would be to clarify our view of God as incorporating both genders, transcending both, and immanent in all things.

For Collins, “experience is the crucible out of which theologies arise” (p. 34). She and others would argue that feminist theology must be primarily rooted in women’s experience. Theology does arise from experience -- we grapple with the theological questions which existentially trouble us. The bulk of theology has been written out of male experience. Women today and in the past have found this to be very alienating and sometimes meaningless. At this point in time and in our culture women do experience the world differently because they have been socialized to live in a separate compartment from that in which men are shut. However, one must use caution in rooting theology in women’s experience. It is important that theology connect with people’s lived experience, but the theologian’s own experience is too limited to be made the norm for all others. If one argues that women’s experience is ontologically different from men’s, then one would have to construct two totally separate religions with a female messiah to come (and some would opt for this alternative). But I believe that potentially men and women share a common human experience to which theology should be relevant and in which it should be rooted. Thus I would not stress the gender distinctions as Jewett seems to do (though he admits he cannot define any differences) but the capacity for relationship with each other and with God which one finds in the concept of the Trinity and in Genesis 2:23-24.

All of these books illustrate the fact that feminist theology is in its infancy. Most are still grappling with the problem of where to begin. They offer only hints of the content of this new theology. But then feminist theology cannot just rehabilitate past systems. The bulk of Daly’s and Ruether’s work has been demolition to clear the site for future building. Several features are clear, however, in these architects' sketches. A feminist’s concept of God will be much fuller, richer than past gods. God will be seen as both he and she, mother and father, brother and sister, transcendent and immanent, infinite and in process, ground and goal, person and action. In Christ, say feminists, God became human, not just “man.” They find in Jesus the embodiment of androgyny (see Virginia Mollenkott’s essay in the March issue of Daughters of Sarah), and they find in his actions the basis for living the kingdom on earth. Salvation is liberation from the boxes with which we have sinfully limited each other and the possibility of wholeness, the full personhood of God’s image for which we were created.

All agree that a feminist theology must be a praxis theology, not a static, abstract system of ideas but an integrated, practical lifestyle. (That is one reason feminist theologies appear so diffuse -- they speak to the whole person rather than focusing narrowly on one abstract, minute point.) Thus Jewett talks about partnership in marriage and the ordination of women. Russell relates her work to Third World concerns. Ruether speaks of racism, anti-socialism, psychology, socialism, and ecology. Daly speaks of finding a new community in sisterhood. Collins seems to be moving in the direction of world socialism as a foundation for human justice. Ruether’s final chapter is clearly more utopian, reminding one of those paintings of “The Peaceable Kingdom.” Feminist theologies are definitely this-worldly and optimistic, despite the horrors of the history of women which they recount (it does seem sometimes that the only direction left for women to go is upward). They have a radical vision of the kingdom of God, and they seek to implement it on earth.

Reviewed by Nancy Hardesty, co-author with Letha Scanzoni of All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women's Liberation (Word, 1974). When this article appeared, Hardesty was working on a dissertation concerning nineteenth century feminism and revivalism at the University of Chicago Divinity School.