Gender and theology Flashcards
society
feminist theologians
-patriarchal understanding of Christianity is mistaken and that a better, truer, non-sexist interpretation can be found
-Christianity needs reinterpreting without patriarchal elements, cleansed of their distorting influences
-Christianity is intrinsically sexist and so flawed it should be discarded with all its sexist practices and beliefs
Rosemary Radford Ruether quote
“God isn’t a ‘being’ removed from creation, ruling it from outside in the manner of a patriarchal ruler; God is the source of being that underlines creation and grounds its nature and future potential for continual transformative renewal in biophilic mutuality”
-biophilic mutuality – mutual, respectful, enriching relationship
maleness of Christ
-Ruether argues that Christianity has become distorted by patriarchal tradition and is in need of a reform
-Catholic Church’s teachings on women’s ordination and abortion have been distorted by patriarchy
-patriarchy has shaped Christian thought about God, which too needs to be challenged
Jesus’ challenge to the male warrior messiah expectation: Davidic Messiah
-Hebrew scriptures (old testament) views the Messiah as God’s chosen one
-davidic messiah = future king in a new kingdom, son of David, restorer of Israel as an autonomous power
-deliverer from bondage through battle, conquering warrior, liberator of people from enemies
-because of special relationship with God, God’s favour will shine upon these people
-Messiah = chosen by God (Son of God) and is representative of his people before God (Son of Man)
-“the Messiah can only be imagines as a male” - sexism and God talk
Jesus’ challenge to the male warrior messiah expectation: Ruether- Jesus the Servant King
-Jesus wasn’t the traditional warrior Messiah
-“He is expected to win, not suffer and die”
-future that Jesus brings isn’t the military victory of the male Messiah
-Jesus was: a servant King, attended to the poor and dispossessed, was critical of Jewish authorities and reigning power (e.g Pontius Pilate), warned his disciples of lording over others= washing of feet
-people are freed not through military bravery but by following the servant king and being servants to God:
-“becoming a servant of God, one is freed from bondage of all human masters”
God as female wisdom principle
-Christianity has a male symbol of Messiah, Ruether argues that Messiah concept isn’t davidic military messiah but a self sacrificing redeeming servant Messiah, linked to female notion of wisdom
-shouldn’t join the maleness of historical Jesus and maleness of Davidic Messiah into the Christian concept of the messiah
-it displaces the female from concept of God
‘sophia’
-‘Sophia’ (Greek for ‘wisdom’ was personified in female form = a goddess
-Ruether argues that early Christians continued to refer to ‘Sophia’ as divine wisdom
1. scripture = divine wisdom is referred to in female terms
2. God is associated with wisdom, wisdom is female
-Christianity has merged the notion of divine wisdom into the notion of messianic king
-idea of female wisdom has become obscured behind a patriarchal veil of male Messiah - Jesus
Jesus as the incarnation of wisdom
-Ruether = divine wisdom is closely linked to Jesus Christ and wisdom is referred to in female terms
-Messiah isn’t just a male version of God but is also the incarnation of wisdom = female
-Ruether (eco-feminist) refers to God as ‘Gaia’ – ancient Greek goddess of earth
-seeking to recover a full account of human nature and a fuller picture of the divine by balancing male and female in our understanding of human nature and God
-produces a truer reflection of ‘imago dei’ (both male and female)
challenges: Simon Chan
-cannot rewrite Christianity to give more prominence to women, it is the story itself that shapes Christian identity
-example, phrase ‘almighty Father’ is engrained within Catholic Church’s Eucharist prayer
-argues that to rewrite these central prayers to downplay the ‘maleness’ would be wrong
-recognises that many feminine images are used to describe God: love, protection, comfort, God should never be called ‘mother’
-unique to Christianity as most ancient religions had a goddess at the centre
-many of the goddess - worshipping cultures were also a patriarchal
-“devotion to the goddess Kali in Hinduism… has never resulted in better treatment of women”
Daly vs Ruether: Daly – post Christian Theologian
-argues that Christianity is irretrievably patriarchal and misogynistic = must be abandoned
-examples, some churches prohibit women to enter around the altar – unclean during menstruation, some churches insist on male priesthood
-male authority figures within the Church
Daly vs Ruether: Ruether – Reformist Feminist Theologian
-Christianity isn’t intrinsically patriarchal, it can be ‘saved’
-identifies alternatives to the male centred view:
-divine wisdom = female
-Jesus spoke and spent time with women (Mary Magdelene)
-women were amongst Jesus’ followers
-women were the first to see him after he rouse from the dead
-some Churches are working to back away from dominant patriarchal ideology (e.g Church of England)
-what is needed to being about change is linking Christian to the spirit = ‘Spirit Christologies’
Daly quote
“if God is male, then male is God. the divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination”
Mary Daly vs God
-men have always sought to oppress women
-religion/Christianity is used as a tool to enforce this oppression with one patriarchal divine person (God) who combines sexism, racism and classism to create a ‘three headed monster’
-women need to get beyond religion
-biblical and popular image of God (patriarch in heaven, who rewards and punishes, seen as ‘God the Father) has spawned the oppression of women
-Daly criticised early Church leaders and Fathers of Christian tradition for anti-feminism
-Tertullian = women are ‘the devil’s gateway’, responsible for the Fall
-Augustine = women weren’t made in imago dei
-Aquinas = women are ill-conceived males
-Luther = Adam = lord, eve spoiled this
God should be castrated
-need to remove old male centred language - remove ‘God as Father’ and the maleness of God
-Bonhoeffer = women are subject to their husbands
-Barth = women are subordinate to men
-Pope Pius XII = links women to the role of mother not formalistic or materialistic equality with men
-Fletcher = making a male made theory focusing on individualism rather than liberation of women
-entire system of ethics and theology is the product of males, preserves sexist, patriarchal society that oppresses women
The Unholy Trinity: Rape
-presents ideas of ‘Rapism’ = culture of rape
-symbol of all violent oppression within a society that includes: racism, man made poverty, ecological disasters etc.
-leaders of society (‘Sovereigns of Sado - Society’) use culture, religion, politics, professions and media to erase female power and oppress them in a state of ‘grateful dead’
-‘Sado’ implies sadomasochism - violence often towards females
-isn’t just rape in theoretical terms, talks about systematic violence towards women – genital mutilation, foot binding, hysterectomy etc.
The Unholy Trinity: Rape – ‘arm chair rapists’
-isn’t just men who commit rape but ‘arm chair rapists’ who through pornography are metaphorically raping women
-mentality of rape is part of this culture of violence
-the culture of ‘rape’ leads to a sexual caste system - hierarchy of victims (females) and dominants in sex (males)
-happens through sex-role socialisation, where children are constantly reinforced
Daly – Rape and the Bible: Judges 19:24
-draws upon example found in judges - scoundrels arrive at a house demanding to abuse a guest staying and the host offers his virgin daughter and concubine
-“I will being them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish”
-leave the daughter and rape the concubine to death
-criticism: doesn’t consider what happens afterwards, the man was outraged and hunted the scoundrel down
Deuteronomy 22:23-30
-a man has sex with a betrothed virgin in a town, both the man and woman are to be put to death — the man for violating another man’s future wife, and the woman for not resisting, she didn’t scream
-a man rapes a betrothed virgin in the countryside,Only the man is put to death. The woman is not guilty of any crime
-a man has sex with a virgin who is not betrothed, and they are discovered, the man must pay the woman’s father 50 shekels of silver and marry her
Indian Caste System
-Dalit = “oppressed” in Sanskrit and “broken/scattered” in Hindi, term for members of lower castes in India
-mostly used for the ones that have been subjected to untouchability
-167 million Dalits live in India
-Dalit people are at the bottom of a hierarchical caste system, chosen by birth
-13 Dalits are murdered each week
-5 Dalits homes are burnt each week
-21 Dalit women are raped each week
The Unholy Trinity: Genocide
-Genocide = deliberate killing
of a large group of people
-‘patriarchally possessed women…lulled into the sleeping death’
-such women have forgotten the reality of the gross inequality that Daly called ‘genocide’
-believed there was a deep link between rape and genocide
-male sexual violence forms the basis of military interests
-raped person is no longer an individual but is part of a group of ‘raped people’
-isn’t just an act on the individual but an act of one group against another (male against female), an expression of the dominant group (rapists)
-genocide happens because of the need of men for violence and also rape can be seen as genocide - ‘killing’ of individualism becoming victims of rape
The Unholy Trinity: War
-there is a connection between the mentality of rape and the phenomenon of war
-identifies accounts of conflicts in which rape was a product of war
-example, thousands of Bengali women raped by West Pakistani soldiers
-points out link between rape and war in the Bible, Moses is enraged after a campaign against Midian because the commanders had spared the lives of all women:
“Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man” - Numbers 31:17
-war = inevitable result of male dominated politics
-believes that language has been corrupted when killing a human in war is ‘just’ but abortion is ‘unjust’
-war is defended by ‘phallic morality’ and a ‘phallic mentality’ (penis driven morals and reasoning)
liberation of women
-women need to seek liberation from this moral hypocrisy
-need to become radically deviant in the fact of patriarchal expectation
-includes rejecting all moral standards (designed by men to defeat women)
-injustices and inequalities that oppress women are bound up in these male moral 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 is equivalent to
assuming the role of witch and madwoman.”
Mary Daly’s Conclusion
-Jesus = the ‘symbolic legitimation of the rape of all women and all matter’ – blaming Jesus for being figurehead of all rape on women, Jesus helped to liberate women
-example, healed the bleeding woman
-underlying culture of rape, genocide and war is impregnated within Christianity itself, these elements are so fundamental to Christianity that leaving this culture means leaving Christianity
Spirituality Experienced Through Nature
-maleness of God needs to overturned so no more priests (male mothers) and traditional holy places (built and run by men)
-go on ‘quintessence’ – highest essence of being which lives, loves and creates, the spirit that permeates all nature, giving life and
vitality to the whole universe
-a turning away from the maleness of God and the fixed nature of sacred places towards the spirit of quintessence – found in the
whole universe through nature
-1970s was a renewed interest in pagan spirituality and nature worship
-called women to ignore the oppressive taboos of patriarchy and connect with their wild side, embraces paganism and eco feminists witchcraft
challenges: Simon Chan
-it is not as simple as saying ‘God is male’
-argues that the Christian idea of fatherhood, as embodied in the Trinity, is unique
-Daly seems is gloss over, the focus that God is the heavenly
father and creator of all = universal fatherhood
-that the male language for God does not create masculine qualities for God
-example in Isaiah 54 God as husband who acts with ‘deep compassion’
-“By implying that God has no feminine qualities implies the
idea of “a distant and impersonal deity”
challenges: Fiorenza
-suggests an alternative to reading of the biblical texts and the sexism present in
them
-argues that the Bible supports women’s struggles against patriarchal sexism such as when Jesus breaks sexist customs
-argues that Daly’s approach is mistakenly narrow
