Of One Humanity

Sojourners: What has feminist theology contributed to the church?

Ruether: Feminist theology, it seems to me, has unmasked the sexist structures of church language, theology, and social policies. It is fundamentally challenging the church to recognize the distortion of the Christian message created by the church's patriarchal socialization, and to reconstruct its social patterns, language, and theology to affirm the full humanity of both women and men.

How does feminist theology interact with black and Third World liberation theologies?

There are, I think, two different tendencies in feminist theology: the inclusive and the exclusive. The exclusive tendency sees sexism as the key to all social oppression, so that if one focuses only on sexism, one encompasses the most foundational oppression.

I belong to a different kind of feminist theology that feels that sexism is one of the structures of oppression, and that it is not particularly helpful to create hierarchical rankings of oppressions in which one tries to argue that a particular oppression is foundational. Rather, I would see sexism, racism, classism, and other kinds of oppression as interconnected in an overall pattern of human alienation and sinfulness.

Given the fact that patriarchy is the social context for both the Old and New Testaments, how does feminist theology root itself in the biblical tradition?

Here again we have exclusive and inclusive tendencies. One view sees the Judeo-Christian tradition as so hopelessly patriarchal that women who are concerned about feminism should abandon the tradition altogether and seek some other framework for their spirituality and religion. Others are still struggling to affirm the biblical tradition but have become so discouraged by the pervasiveness of patriarchy that they have begun to doubt whether the biblical tradition is in fact reclaimable.

I would take a second position, which is that patriarchy has deeply shaped and molded the cultural context of biblical religion, within the Scripture itself as well as its ongoing heritage of the church. The Scriptures were written by people in patriarchal societies, and they reflect that cultural context, which has deeply penetrated many of the laws, biblical symbols, and so on. Nevertheless, I would still say that the radical impulse of biblical faith is fundamentally incompatible with patriarchy.

The visioners of prophetic faith announce God's word precisely as the vindication of those people who are depersonalized, dehumanized, oppressed, and impoverished by social structures of injustice. Intrinsic to biblical faith is the liberation message of a God who comes, not to sanctify existing social structures, but to cry out against them, to unmask them as fundamentally false and contrary to God's will, and to open up an alternative vision of a new humanity in which all of these patterns of social oppression are overcome.

Feminism is not a new principle, but rather an extension of the fundamental biblical principle that the word of God comes in judgment upon all social structures of injustice. One cannot use biblical faith in any way to sacrilize social structures of injustice or to claim that these represent God's will. The prophetic word is constantly renewed precisely to unmask the human tendency to distort biblical faith into the sacrilization of evil.

One of the chapters of your book, Sexism and God Talk, is entitled, "Christology: Can a Male Savior Save Women?" Can you summarize your answer to this very central question?

The answer depends on the status of the word "male." Is the maleness of Jesus as the Christ thought of as an ontological necessity or as a historical particularity?

If the maleness is a historical particularity, then it has no relevance other than as one of many particularities of Jesus as a historical person, such as the fact that Jesus was Jewish, Galilean, of certain height or weight, or whatever. Jesus' maleness is simply one of many of those particularities that define every individual person. It has no ultimate theological significance.

If, on the other hand, maleness is raised to some kind of ontological status, suggesting that Jesus had to be male in order to be a redeemer (and the usual assumption here is that he had to be male either because God is thought of as male or because maleness is thought of as a more perfect and normative expression of humanity than femaleness), then Jesus' maleness is transformed into a kind of theological category that necessarily marginalizes women. They will be thought of as given only a secondary redemption that cannot include them in full representation of Christ. Ultimately this is contradictory to the notion that Jesus in fact functions as a redeemer for women.

So it seems to me that if one is to affirm that Jesus is the redeemer of all humanity, male and female, Jew and Greek, of all times and human conditions, then one cannot transform male-ness into this kind of ontological category but must see it as simply one expression of Jesus' particularity.

Jesus as the Christ must on the one hand stand as the paradigm of the human, representing all human beings. It is his humanity, not his maleness, by which he represents us. Jesus must, on the other hand, represent a word of God that is not limited by gender, time, or culture. Once we have understood that Jesus' humanity is inclusive, not exclusive, we open up the whole understanding of Christ's relationship to redeemed humanity. The symbol of Christ must not be encapsulized in Jesus, as though he alone represented a kind of perfect humanity; rather he represents the humanity to which we all aspire and that we are empowered to pursue through him.

Jesus' humanity points beyond himself to the new humanity that is indeed both male and female and includes all people of every time and place. The humanity Jesus points toward, and which we await, is not simply the return of Jesus' historical humanity, but the redeemed and fulfilled humanity that includes us all.

Like so many feminist thinkers, you have drawn the connection between devaluation of women and the hierarchy of culture over nature. Do you see feminism as part of the solution to the current ecological crisis?

There are connections between feminism and ecology, but one must first recognize that part of what feminism is about is sensitizing us to a new model of relationship. Feminism isn't the only movement directing us toward this new model. All liberation movements, in one way or another, are directing us there.

Feminism particularly upholds a model of relationship that stresses mutuality, rather than domination or subjugation. This model becomes relevant to ecology when we extend it to our relationship to nature. Humanity does not rule over nature; in fact nature gets along much better without us. We must find a way of living upon the earth in which the structures of human society and productivity necessary to sustain human life fit into the ecology of nature harmoniously.

We must model a new relationship to nature, and I think feminism offers some clues for it. But in order to translate that model into practice, of course, one must do more than just visualize it ideologically or culturally. One must reshape the actual social structures of human ecology in relationship to nature.

Mary
Your Catholic background has provided you with one of the strongest feminine figures in the history of the church, Mary, the mother of Jesus. What are the patriarchal assumptions underlying the church's theology of Mary? Can Mary become a positive or redemptive figure for Christian women?

Mary is, in fact, a very ambivalent symbol for women. Mariology has been shaped in the Christian tradition primarily as the expression of what I would call the male feminine. There is a very big difference between the male feminine and the affirmation of femaleness or women.

The male feminine represents those qualities that males alienate and suppress in themselves and then project onto women. Men then expect women to compensate for male self-alienation by representing all of those qualities that males have repressed; in our society these have traditionally been the nurturing and affective qualities.

To a large extent, Mary has been simply a cultural and religious symbol of this projection. She becomes the idealized nurturant mother, cut off from those qualities of sexuality and wifehood that are despised by men. When women try to model themselves after that understanding of Mary, they receive something very distorted and alienating for them—an act that is impossible for any woman to follow. Virginal motherhood is not something any woman can actually accomplish.

On the other hand, I think there are resources in the biblical and Christian tradition of Mariology that can transcend this male feminine. Here I would point particularly to perhaps the only New Testament text that is authentically Mariological, in which Mary is actually reflected upon as a theological symbol. That text is the Magnificat. Here Mary is not in any way thought of as representative of the feminine.

A liberation Mariology would see Mary not as the representative of the feminine, but rather as the representative of the church as the liberated humanity that has experienced God's grace by being the recipient of God's revolutionary transformation of history on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. Through Mary, through this elect community, God is putting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. Mary becomes the representative of the victims of society, rather than a vehicle for rationalizing and putting a sweet face upon victimization, which is essentially what Mariology has done.

Ministry Without Hierarchy
You are very familiar with and have written about base community movements in Latin America, Western Europe, and North America. What are their hopeful signs, and how do they relate to a North American Christian feminist agenda?

Fundamental to basic Christian communities is a non-hierarchical model of Christian community, which restores ministry to service and liberates ministry from clericalism. Clericalism is a model of leadership that disempowers those who are led or served, and turns them into clients and dependents. This is opposed to ministry, in which one uses gifts and powers of leadership to empower others, to teach them, to draw out their capacities, so that one can enter into a relationship of mutuality.

Basic Christian communities reclaim this biblical understanding of ministry as leadership that leads to mutual empowerment, as opposed to the degeneration of ministry into clericalism.

This understanding of ministry does not mean that there aren't structures, or that certain people aren't chosen to lead at times; it simply means that the mandate of leadership is to nurture the community into mutual ministry, rather than to disempower the community and make its people into dependents.

The attempt of basic Christian communities to overcome this clericalism is relevant to feminism because what disempowers women in ministry is clericalism, which is built on the patriarchal model of relationships. Women will always be disempowered in ministry as long as ministry is understood in terms of patriarchal clericalism.

What are the crucial issues for women in the church now? Where should we focus our energy?

We are bombarded every day with chaos and violence all over the world, and in one sense, it is somewhat arbitrary where we choose to put our energy. I think it's important that people do choose, because you can't do anything effectively unless you focus your energy. But the reasons for choosing one particular issue over another are somewhat arbitrary.

In a broader sense, the most critical focus for feminism in the church is precisely the liberation of the church itself from patriarchy. Women in the church cannot really rest with a clerical, patriarchal church. They must struggle to convert the church to an understanding of its mission, which will include the full promotion of the humanity of women. The church must come to recognize that patriarchy is fundamentally contrary to the gospel and that the liberation of humanity from patriarchy is in fact an intrinsic aspect of the mission of the church itself. The church must then reshape its symbol structure and internal life to be compatible with that message.

With the right-wing backlash to feminism and the apparent apathy among younger women, many social critics are saying that the women's movement of this century is dying. What is your sense of the movement?

I have no idea whether the feminist movement is getting stronger or weaker, or whether it is just being born or is almost dying. My guess is that in fact there isn't any one trend, that there are different trends going on in different communities and subcommunities. Furthermore, it seems to me, the question about whether the feminist movement is growing or getting weaker is somewhat misguided because it suggests that we should commit ourselves to feminism only if it is winning. For me the commitment to feminism is fundamental to the commitment to justice, to authentic human life itself. So it is really quite secondary whether feminism is growing or getting weaker, or whether it is popular at the moment.

In fact I would expect that the more influential feminism becomes, the more it moves into broader circles of society, the stronger will be the backlash against it. Patriarchy, which is fundamental to assumptions about power and domination, does not give up easily. Therefore, the backlash grows precisely as feminism becomes more serious.

An example is the recent reaction to the inclusive language lectionary. In many places, in seminaries, in small groups of Christians, discussion and acceptance of inclusive language has been occurring for a long time.

When this thinking is transferred into practice for the first time in an actual lectionary, the whole issue suddenly gains a much broader forum, and in the process, the violence against it erupts with the kind of force that one could hardly have imagined: death threats are sent to members of the committee that worked on the inclusive language lectionary, threats against their lives and those of their children, and so on. As feminism reaches out to new constituencies it also taps the enormous pool of hostility and violence that is the ultimate recourse of patriarchy.

The dissolution of the American family has been attributed by some to the rise of feminism in this country. Would you say there is a crisis in family life? If so, what do you think are the underlying causes?

I would say that there is no more a crisis in American family life in 1980 than there was in 1920 or 1820 or in the medieval family or the Roman family or the Greek family. In other words, the crisis of the family is always with us. People in every century have thought that the family was on the verge of break-up and decline.

People don't understand that the family itself is not static, but is a flexible and changing unit of relationship that is constantly in adaptation. The family is a changeable pattern of relationships that has carried out different functions in different periods of time and that has adjusted in its relationships to religion, to society, to work, in different periods.

A second reason why the family is always seen as being in crisis is because patriarchal relationships in the family create a fundamentally pathological dimension to family relationships. Patriarchy by its very nature sets up family relationships of dependency and violence, based on exploitative patterns between men and women that are ultimately reinforced by abuse and violence. In better family relationships this situation has perhaps been modified or healed, but it remains fundamental to the way in which the family has been structured in patriarchy.

Today this pathological element of the family takes some particular forms that come from the interconnections between patriarchy and capitalism. I hesitate to say capitalism, because some of these same patterns are also present in socialist societies; they have more to do with industrialism than simply capitalism. Nevertheless, they exist in a much more raw and exploitative form under capitalism.

A family molded by the combination of patriarchy and capitalism creates a family pattern that splits the woman's domestic role from the male economic role outside the home, making the family fundamentally dependent on economic structures outside of its control, and making women and children economic dependents of male breadwinners. This pattern carries the possibility of abandoning women and children to poverty when the male breadwinner decides he is not interested in supporting the family anymore. Increasingly we have a feminization of poverty built on the double reality that women are poorly paid in the marketplace and at the same time are the primary housekeepers and parents of the family. With an increasingly narcissistic culture among men, growing numbers of women and children are abandoned to poverty, and women are expected to carry both roles of breadwinner and primary parent under very difficult conditions.

If, then, there are some specific or radical elements of the crisis of the family today, they have to do with the exacerbation of the relationship of exploitative capitalism and patriarchy. From that perspective feminism is in no way the cause of the crisis of the family, but on the contrary, feminism is an effort to critique it, to locate its authentic causes, and to seek some kind of solutions, both in personal male-female relationships and in the relationship of the family to the economic order that will modify at least, and perhaps even overturn, this crisis of the family created by patriarchy and capitalism.

Rosemary Radford Ruether—editor, scholar of feminist theology, and author of many books including Sexism and God Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology—was Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago when this article appeared.