3.5B- Gender and theology Flashcards
Martin Luther: Equal oppotunities
-He wrote: “Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring us children. If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die form bearing. She is there to do it.”
-This quote means that there is a restricted path for women, and a clear divide between the roles for men and women, which Martin Luther seems keen to adhere to the patriarchal structure.
God and feminist theologians
-Some secular feminists consider that belief in a God who is totally different from the world is a major cause of sexism. This is because a belief in a transcendent creator God creates a master-slave relationship, which in turn reinforces the patriarchal mindset of a male (master)-female (slave) hierarchy.
Feminist theologians and Christianity
-Feminist theologians consider that it is not Christianity which is at fault but secular feminism which is deficient, for without material and spiritual liberation neither women nor men can live full human livers.
-The major secular feminist objections to Christianity (the Bible as inherently patriarchal and God having a master-slave relationship with humanity) are constant challenges to feminist theologians but as difficult as they are they are they not necessarily undefeatable: many feminist theologians think they can offer coherent responses.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: Monotheism and patriarchy
-Argues that in order to understand how Christian theology has developed it’s oppressive patriarchy, it is first necessary to go back to earlier times when this was not the case.
-She is particularly struck by how polytheistic religions are far less sexist and patriarchal than monotheists religions.
-Strict monotheism tends to reinforce a patriarchal hierarchy where the single (male) God exerts authority over nature and the world and justifies male superiority over women as men consider this to be part of the God-given hierarchy of nature.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: The Goddess
-Ruether’s argument is that the roots of Judaism from which Christianity developed were not strictly monotheistic and God was far less male orientated.
-Although Judaism is a monotheistic religion is retained it’s respect for nature by maintaining the idea of the Goddess as the source of life into it’s worship and relationship with God.
-For example, in a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, God is depicted as the mother Goddess going through the pain of childbirth. Isiah uses the mother analogy as a means of expressing God’s suffering love for Israelite people because of their faithlessness. “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labour, I will gasp and pant.” (Isaiah 42:14)
Rosemary Radford Ruether: God as female and as female wisdom
-In the Old Testament, God’s wisdom is often described in human form.
-When this happens, often the characteristics described are feminine. In the passage from Proverbs 8, God as Wisdom is being portrayed as female.
-Ruether concludes from this that the maleness of God is not fundamental to who God is- there are both male and female aspects to God.
-Although wisdom plays an important role in many books of the Old Testament, it is the late book of The Wisdom of Solomon where God’s wisdom is particularly well developed, where God is described in a very feminine way, in 7:24-26.
-Having established that Judaism does not have a strict monotheism, Ruether goes on to show that Christianity preserves the feminine aspect of God in the incarnation and the Trinity.
-Many of the early Christians immediately saw the connection between the female ‘sophia’ from the Wisdom of Solomon, used instead of the word ‘wisdom’, and Jesus Christ. Presenting Jesus as divine wisdom explained his relationship to God, his identity on earth and the source of his teaching.
-Additionally, the author of John’s Gospel presents Christ as ‘eternal wisdom’ using a masculine Greek equivalent word to ‘sophia’ , ‘logos’ (meaning ‘word’) because Jesus was male. As logos, God created the universe (John 1:1-3) and then was incarnated in the form of Jesus (John 1:14). The Holy Spirit is also depicted in ‘sophia’ terms as the immanent, relational aspect of God.
-Therefore, in the Christian notion of god as Trinity, there is no strict male/female division: the Son is wisdom/’logos’ and the Holy Spirit is wisdom/’sophia’.
-Ruether’s claim is that the Trinity is a relational and gender-inclusive spiritual experience.
-Yet, despite all this Biblical evidence, Christianity has ignored the female/Goddess aspect of God and promoted it’s strict (male) monotheism.
-Ruether’s argument is that there is ample evidence to tackle sexism in the Church not only by reshaping the way Christians think of God but also in rethinking it’s organisation.
Antipatriarchal communities
-One of Ruether’s major concerns is that many Churches have lost their radical equal roots.
-Her argument is that there is plenty of historical evidence to five the Churches the authority they need to change.
-Her argument is that Jesus’ relationship to God was based on trust and respect. He called God, Abba, the Hebrew for father or daddy and not sir or lord. Early Christians used this as a model for their relationships. In the new Christian communities traditional family ties are challenged and all it’s members are brothers and sisters living as friends; there are no masters and servants.
-Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel are foundational for this radically new way of life.
-But despite this, the language of God the father has often become a justification for patriarchy rather than a challenge to it, especially once Christianity ceased to represent an alternative way of life and became mainstream.
-Throughout Christian history there have always been small radical groups who have protested against the patriarchal mainstream.
-The basic Christian command should be, ‘obey God, not men!’; Ruether’s involvement in the Women’s Church movement is one way of addressing the present situation.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: The apophatic path and inclusive language
-One criticism that is often made of feminist theology is that using feminine language to address God is as sexist and alienating as patriarchal language.
-However, as God infinite and as human language can only refer to finite things, then all theological language referring to God must be based on the apophatic (the method of referring to God by what he is not, because he is beyond all human language.) assumption that God is beyond language and in that sense beyond gender.
-However, gendered language may act as analogies and symbols of how humans experience God.
-Ruether concludes that it is true to say that God/ess by analogy as much as he/she is not he/she.
-Feminist theology is not claiming exclusive female-gendered language about God/ess but rather warning against retaining only male and patriarchal language.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: Can a male saviour (Jesus) dave women?
-Ruether argues that it is one of Christianity’s strengths that many of its ideas can be found in other, non-Christian religious, philosophical ideas, experiences and traditions.
-Yet, the presentation of traditional Christianity as developed in the established Churches has often been to exclude these ‘non-Christian’ elements and to control what is considered to be true/untrue.
-It is these church traditions that support a male-centred and patriarchal view of Christianity.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: No, a male saviour cannot save women
-Ruether argues two reasons why Jesus or Christianity cannot save women:
-Jesus is not historically male but as the Word or ‘Logos’ of God he is also the perfect example of what it means to be human, which means being male. For a women to be saved it would mean denying the kind of person she is and adapting to a male mindset.
-When Christianity was adopted as the official language of the Roman Empire in 380CE it actively promoted Jesus as a triumphal ‘king’ who would return to bring in his new kingdom. This had a very big implication for women. It suggests that women can only achieve salvation through the control of men.
-Even today, the Catholic Church is still reluctant to ordain women to the ministry.
-For centuries Aquinas’ teaching that women are ‘misbegotten’ or distorted men was used by the Church to explain why god as ‘Logos’ couldn’t have been incarnated as a ‘defective’ women but only as a perfect man. This in turn justifies the argument against woman’s ordination.
-In the Declaration ‘Inter Insigniores’ (1976) the Pope stated that as ‘there must be a ‘natural resemblance’ which exists between Christ and his minister’, then women cannot become members of the ordained ministry.
-Ruether’s conclusion is that traditional Christianity is sexist and cannot be a means of salvation or liberation for women.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: Yes, a male saviour can save women
-The death and resurrection of Christ is especially significant as it touches on a very basic human experience of nature in the annual cycle of death of the old year and the birth of the new.
-In the ancient world, this was often represented as the death of the kingly god of vegetation who was raised to new life by the Goddess.
-Far from undermining Christianity, Ruether argues that because this idea is so deeply ingrained into the human psyche, it gives the Christian story particular power and validity.
-Jesus’ role as messiah deliberately challenged the warrior-king expectation of his day.
-His teaching on the Kingdom of God was not about having worldly power but gaining justice and dignity for the marginalised. The Kingdom is not only a reward after death but healing and restoring all human relationships now.
-The Holy Spirit continues the work begun in Jesus’ lifetime by healing relationships and challenging human institutions which are more concerned with their own power.
-Ruether gives many examples of Christian communities and teachers who resisted the tendency to make their Christologies confirm to mainstream patriarchal society and it’s practices. The story of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4) describes how after Jesus’ ascension, the Spirit was poured out on to men and women as a sign of a new period of history. Pentecost has inspired subsequent Christian groups to consider the historical Jesus as less important than the Spirit which represents God’s spiritual presence.
-Ruether argues that these Christian movements (such as the Shakers) and their Christologies have done more than merely feminise God. Their notions of salvation tackle the weaknesses of all humans, so this is why a male saviour in a Spirit-filled sense can save women.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: Christ the liberator
-In conclusion, Ruether acknowledges that there is no clear ‘yes’ as to whether a male saviour can save women. The problem is that the New Testament offers various Christologies and differing views as to what salvation is.
-It may be that for some women the fact that Jesus is male may always be a problem. But Ruether argues that once we understand how Christianity developed then the patriarchal elements of the New Testament and later Christianity can be removed.
-Once this is done, what is revealed if Jesus the liberator who challenged the social, religious and spiritual assumptions of his own day for both men and women. That is why Jesus’ maleness is ultimately not relevant.
-She argues that Jesus wanted equality and to remove power imbalances, and this therefore is the part of Jesus we should focus on.
Mary Daly
-The first sign of Daly’s critical view of the Church was marked by the publication of ‘The Church and the Second Sex’ in 1968- a book which owed much to Simone de Beauvoir. Her aim here was to draw attention to the marginalisation of women in the Church in the hope that the Church authorities would reform their organisation and theology.
- Her new philosophical and theological position was stated in her landmark book ‘Beyond God the Father’ (1973) where she attacked the Church as being the chief source of women’s abuse.
-Daly subsequently developed the view that in earlier times women had achieved a spiritual relationship with nature which patriarchal cultures had destroyed using God as a justification.
-Daly used archaic language to shift consciousness and give women the tools to stand outside the current culture as outsiders. In her book ‘Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism’ (1978) show showed how women as ‘hags’ are to ‘exorcise’ the spirit of patriarchy and seek instead the spiritual forces of nature.
-She describes herself as ‘a traveller’ seeking out new forms of living beyond patriarchy. The extent of her new vocabulary necessitated her own dictionary, which she published in 1987 called ‘Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language’.
-Her new language also established a new code of language, chants and incantations designed to free radical feminists from patriarchy and to aid in their communication with ‘be-ing’, the on-going processes of nature.
-For example, the word ‘’spinster’ comes from the idea of spinners who span wool, often in groups, but men has turned this into a derogatory term. Daly used this word to make women realise that they must work together to transform society and to free it from Christian patriarchy.
-Daly’s vision was a future Amazonian age where women had taken over from men in their superiority, referring to the myth of the warrior women of the Amazon (Wonder Woman).
-Although Daly is often presented merely as a radical feminist and anti-religion, her own life-story indicates that what she really rejected was the formal nature of religion as an institution, along with it’s doctrines and forms of control.
-According to Daly, central to the Church’s means of power is the belief in and doctrines about God. As these doctrines have been developed by men to favour men, then Daly argues that it is not sufficient to present God in female terms because a female version of God would still be male in essence.
-Daly is famous for saying, “If God is male then the male is God”. For Daly, what is required is a transvaluation of the whole of Christianity.
Mary Daly: Transvaluation
-Daly’s aim in ‘Beyond God the Father’ has something in common with the 19th Century philosopher Frederich Nietzsche’s concern that to deliver humans from self-imposed cultural imprisonment requires transvaluation- a complete re-evaluation of all existing values.
-Daly also borrows his notion that to enter into this new era of human consciousness then everything which ensures the existence of the present culture must be overturned.
-Both Nietzsche and Daly believe that this new era will not be possible without the death of God and Christianity.
Daly uses the following ideas of Nietzsche: The idea that two aspects of human nature exist- the Apollonian or passive self and the Dionysian or the energetic and creative self and that she argues that only women can be Dionysian. The idea of the Apollonian veil, something that is created when humans falsely create ideas that they then believe are true which alienate them from their naturally creative and imaginative selves. Daly argues that only women have the ability to remove these false ideas. And finally the idea of Becoming and be-ing- Being human is a creative on-going process, there is no perfect end point at which one can say this is what it means to be human because there is no objective creator God. Daly argues that only women understand the creative process of ‘be-ing’. ‘Be-ing’ as the spiritual process of living completely replaces any idea of an objective God in Daly’s philosophy.
Mary Daly: Beyond God the Father
-Disagrees with Nietzsche on one point: that Nietzsche’s transvaluation of God merely subsitutes God the Father with man the god.
-The transvaluation of all phallic values (Daly’s equivalent term to patriarchal values) begins therefore with a complete annihilation or ‘castration’ of God. This means the abolition of the word God and all associated ideas. As she says, this is not the same as rationally arguing for the non-existence of God, but something deeper in which the old God is replaced with authentic human existence.
-Daly does not consider herself an atheist as atheists still retain an idea of God, nor does she consider herself an agnostic as the agnostic lacks convincing knowledge of God. For Daly, ‘be-ing’ replaces God; be-ing is a spiritual process of the continual discovery of the richness of nature.
Mary Daly: New language and be-ing
-The process of transvaluation is the conscious and radical re-invention of language. Daly’s often provocative use of old vocabulary used in new ways is to give women the means to articulate their vison of a new world entirely free from all forms of patriarchy. The patriarchal world is characterised by two forms, the Foreground and Background.
-Foreground is the world dominated by patriarchal Apollonian values. It is a false world, which is sucking the life-force out of women and nature. She calls it’s male leaders ‘snoots’; female snoots are ‘henchwomen’ who gain their power form snoots. Background existence is the world of women and true be-ing. Women have become used to living in the shadow of men but the Background is older, more energetic and is closer to the reality of being itself. According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian attributes are reason, culture, harmony, and restraint.
-Archaic or old-fashioned languages is a means of re-connecting women with their ancient relationship with nature/be-ing.
-Some of the old-fashioned worlds transvaluated by Daly were patriarchal Foreground ‘false naming’ words designed to disempower women, such as hag, crone, nag and witch but as Background words they have become empowering terms with the power to exorcise (the role of the witch) and lead to ecstasy (spiritual freedom.)
-As be-ing is not static, women are also spinsters ‘spinning’ new meanings/ history; they are ‘courageous explorers’ of new non-patriarchal ways of living.
Mary Daly: The Most Unholy Trinity
-Daly is outspoken in her claim that a root cause of western society’s abuse of women is Christianity.
-She argues that all Christianity stands for is it’s desire to destroy women and elevate male values.
-She considers Christianity as a root cause of women’s abuse over the centuries. For example, she sees the symbol of Jesus’ death on the cross as an expression of male enjoyment of pain, torture and sexual dominance over women. Another failure of Christianity is the way in which the Catholic Church in particular has presented the Virgin Mary, as a symbol of purity and womanhood. But the reality, Daly argues, is that she is the “Total Rape Victim”.
-In developing her claim that the Christian God and the Church is the chief cause of women’s abuse, Daly parodies the central notion of God as the Trinity by substituting its three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with three male symbols of power which she considers that the Church has promoted. “The Most Unholy Trinity of Rape, Genocide and War is a logical expression of phallocentric power”.
-A phallocentric ‘rape culture’ is one based on power and not on true community. Rape is both literal and metaphorical.
-Daly says that by portraying women as entirely passive, they are raped both literally and metaphorically. Men also commit ‘armchair rape’ when they enjoy pornography.
-Rape is assumed as ‘normal’ in Biblical writings. In it’s metaphorical sense, Christianity has been a major reason why women have been abused and treated as passive objects.
-A rape culture represents an alienated society where one group destroys another, just as one race murders and destroys another. Daly argues that the Catholic Church also commits genocide when it forces women to have unwanted children as a result of rape because of it’s anti-abortion teaching. It also promotes genocide in it’s support of war and the slaughter of innocent citizens.
-War symbolises the very worse of Apollonian values, which have been praised by the Church. The process of ‘un-veiling’ shows just how inconsistent moral theologians (and politicians) are when they defend war to ensure justice yet condemn other compassionate forms of killing such as abortion and euthanasia.
Mary Daly: Friendship and Lesbianism
-Daly argues that true friendship can only be lesbian.
-She is deeply critical forms of lesbianism which imitate male characteristics (e.g. ‘butch’ lesbianism). In ‘Beyond God the Father’, the issue of whether radical feminists are lesbians or not is a ‘pseudo problem’.
-For Daly, the notion of homosexuality is another example of patriarchal idea, which the Church has developed because it has a clear ideas of male and female difference. However, Daly believes that biological difference is not destiny; all relationships are valid if they work within the Holy Whole Trinity of radical feminist values (Justice, Power, and Love).
Mary Daly: Neither male nor female
-Often Christians have claimed that despite Daly’s accusation that as God is male then the male is God, Jesus’ teaching opened up a vision of a new transformed society in which gender distinction would disappear.
-St Paul, for example, taught that, “there is neither male or female; for all of you are on in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). But Daly considers that this is a feeble attempt to make Christianity palatable.
-St Paul never imagined that gender would become irrelevant because as Christ was male, then women would have to become like men. For Daly the Church is a living example of how true this is.
Mary Daly: Spinning- a new spirituality
-Daly is certain that radical feminism will triumph and overcome all the leftovers of post-Christianity society and create what she call the ‘cosmic tapestry’ comprising the Most Holy Whole Trinity of power, justice and love.
-Unlike other radical feminists, Daly’s vision is a deeply spiritual one, which unites women with elemental forces of nature.
-It will not be easy, for just as nature can suffer from the ravages of human exploitation, women also experience the same ‘earthquake’ moments of patriarchy.
-She describes women’s spiritual journey using the traditional tasks performed by women as spinner or spinsters. But whereas today ‘spinster’ has a negative meaning of a lonely single women, for Daly spinster describes women working together (as they would have done in the past as spinners), creating from nature cloth.
-The way of life which women are now spinning is transformed spirituality which is free from Christian patriarchy and which she hopes will also eventually transvaluate all of society.
