Gender and Theology AO1

Question 1

What is feminist theology?

Answer 1

Questions male supremacy and female subordination in theology
Contest male hegemony - God is more like men or should be spoken about as a man
Challenge the idea women are created subordinate and rejection of this is sin

Some want reform - strip away cultural context and find heart of Christianity cleansed of distorting influences (non-sexist interpretations)
Some believe Christianity is irreparably and intrinsically sexist

Question 2

What does Daly argue religion is?

Answer 2

Religion is a tool of oppression used by men
Argued provocatively women need to get beyond religion

Question 3

Who inspired Daly?

Answer 3

Nietszhe

Question 4

What does Daly argue about female oppression?

Answer 4

Product of cultural and historical impact of Christianity’s unholy trinity of rape, war and genocide

Question 5

What does Daly argue God is?

Answer 5

One patriarchal divine God combines sexism, racism and classism to become a three-headed monster that must be fought

Question 6

What does Daly say about the idea of God the father?

Answer 6

In human imagination, this image has spawned mechanisms for the oppression of women
It is inadequate and God’s maleness should be removed: God should be castrated
Women need to stop using andro-centric language

Question 7

What does Daly argue the husband dominating the wife?

Answer 7

Represents God himself
If God is male, then male is God
Patriarchal religion perpetuates these sexual role delusions and calls them natural, bestowing supernatural blessings on them

Question 8

What does Daly argue about female ordination?

Answer 8

Criticised idea women cannot be ordained because Jesus was male

Question 9

What does Daly argue about the role of women?

Answer 9

Criticised idea that Christian women have the role of motherhood

Question 10

Which experts of the Christian tradition for their anti-feminism did she critique and why?

Answer 10

Augustine
Women responsible for the fall
Women were not made in the image of God

Aquinas
Women were misbegotten males

Luther
Eve spoiled Adam being lord of all

Question 11

Which modern theologians did Daly criticise and why?

Answer 11

Fletcher
Lacks communal thinking needed to liberate women

Bonhoeffer
Women to be subject to their husbands

Barth
Husbands as superior authority

Entire system of ethics and philosophy is the product of males serving interests of the patriarchal society overly, explicitly oppressing women in the process

Question 12

What is rapism?

Answer 12

Culture of rape
Mentality of rape creates pervasive culture of violence that is difficult to break out of
Rape is the cultural manifestation of the sexual caste system

Question 13

What does Daly argue about societal leaders?

Answer 13

Societal leaders (sovereigns of sado-society) use culture, religion, politics, media to erase female power and imprison women in the state of grateful dead

Question 14

What does Daly argue about non-feminist women?

Answer 14

Women obsessed with patriarchy have forgotten the reality of the gross inequality (gynocide) and become divided against each other

Exploitative system is perpetuated by the consent of the victims as well as the dominant sex through sex-role socialisation

Conditioning begins at birth and is constantly reinforced through life experiences, entertainment, adverts

Question 15

What are Daly’s examples of systematic acts of physical violence against women and how are they connected?

Answer 15

Rape
Genital mutilation
Foot binding
Widow burning

Question 16

What is Daly’s connection between rape and war?

Answer 16

Argued there is a connection between the mentality of rape and the phenomenon of war

i.e. accounts of conflicts in which rape was a product of war such as the rape of hundreds of Bengali women by West Pakistani soldiers in 1971 or the Rape of Nanjing

Question 17

Where does Daly argue there is a link between rape and war in the Bible?

Answer 17

Moses is enraged after a campaign against Midian because the commanders had spared the lives of all women

Judges: scoundrels arrive at a house demanding to abuse a guest staying there and the host offers his daughter as a substitute for the guest
Offers his concubine instead and the visitors rape her to death

Question 18

What are arm-chair rapists?

Answer 18

Rape isn’t limited to the act - some men are ‘arm chair rapists’ who enjoy stories of rape through pornography or who metaphorically rape women by looking pornography using it to enhance their sense of power of women

Question 19

How does rape link to genocide?

Answer 19

Male sexual violence forms the basis for military interests

Question 20

What is rape?

Answer 20

Rape makes the raped person the objective victim of the rapist; the raped person stops being an individual and becomes part of a group of raped people

It objectifies all those who can be cast into the role of victims of violence.

*It is an act of one group against another, of male against female

Question 21

What is Daly’s view on the role of the RCC?

Answer 21

There is something wrong with the groupthink that is found in Christianity and the Church that is responsible for patriarchal culture
Links to Nazis ?!

Question 22

What is war?

Answer 22

Inevitable result of male-dominated politics

Horrors of war are associated with manly and adventurous virtues, with men doing powerful acts of violence

Question 23

What does Daly say about the Language of violence in war?

Answer 23

Hidden by technical language

Collateral damage = murder in conflict

Killing of born babies in conflict is called just but killing of unborn humans during an abortion is unjust (compelling point)

Question 24

What is war defended by?

Answer 24

Phallic mentality
Phallic morality
Women must seek liberation from this moral hypocrisy

Question 25

What is Daly’s idea of female liberation?

Answer 25

Radically deviate from patriarchy
Reject moral standards constructed by men
Full-frontal assault on patriarchy requires complete demolition of expectations of women
No less than a total revolution
Christianity must be abandoned as the key element of sustaining and shaping these morals and socials standards
Should turn to spirituality experienced through nature

Question 26

What is spiritually experienced through nature? (Daly)

Answer 26

Maleness of God must be overturned
Nature of sacred spaces toward the spirit of quintessence

Sacred mens clubs of priests who control the spiritual moments of life through religious authority have locked women into an Eden that must be shattered

Traditional holy spaces are not suitable

Sacred spaces for a movement to free men and women

Focus on quintessence - damaged by porn, violence, poverty but rediscovered through nature

Part of 1970s renewed interest in pagan spirituality and nature worship - called on women to ignore the oppressive taboos of patriarchy and connect with eco-feminist witchcraft and paganism

Question 27

What does Daly argue the incarnation of Christ is?

Answer 27

‘Symbolic legitimisation of the rape of all women and all matter’

Question 28

What does Daly argue should be done about Christianity?

Answer 28

Unholy trinity is so fundamental to Christianity that to change the culture means leaving it

Question 29

What type of feminist is Rosemary Radford Ruether?

Answer 29

Reform feminist theologian
Eco-feminist
Campaigns for RCC to change view on abortion
Advocates for women’s ordination

Question 30

Why does Ruether argue Christianity needs reform?

Answer 30

Distorted by patriarchal traditions and is in need of reform as a consequence

RCC views have been influenced and distorted by patriarchy and patriarchy has shaped Christian thought about God, and this too must be challenged

Question 31

Why does Ruether argue Jesus challenges the warrior-messiah expectation?

Answer 31

Does not fulfil expectations from Hebrew Scriptures of a Davidic Messiah as a conquering warror and liberator
Messiah must be male (Son of God, Son of Man)
Jesus does not bring military victory - rejects nationalist-revenge
Jesus is the servant king, attending to poor and dispossessed - criticised Jewish authority

People are freed by following the servent king and becoming servents of God

Question 32

What does Jesus actually represent as the Messiah? (Ruether)

Answer 32

Christianity has a male symbol for the idea of Messiah but it shouldn’t contain Davidic military ideas - should represent self-sacrificing, redeeming servant Messiah who is connected to the female notion of wisdom

Christianity should not bundle maleness of historical Jesus and the maleness of the Davidic military Messiah into the Christian concept of Messiah as this displaces the female from the concept of God

Question 33

How is God the female wisdom principle and Jesus the incarnation of wisdom in Ruether’s thinking?

Answer 33

Sophia is greek for wisdom - ancient world wisdom was a goddess
Ruether argues that early Christians continued to refer to Sophia as divine wisdom

Question 34

What are examples of female terms used for wisdom in scripture? (Ruether)

Answer 34

Proverbs 9:1 - Wisdom is female and God is wisdom

Question 35

How has female wisdom become obscured? (Ruether)

Answer 35

Christianity merged the notion of divine wisdom into the notion of a messianic king and the idea has become obscured behind the patriarchal veil of the male Messiah, Jesus

Question 36

Where in scripture is divine wisdom linked to Christ? (Ruether)

Answer 36

Paul in Corinthians

Logos before man in Jesus = Sophia as the ground of creation

Question 37

How is Jesus more than just a male part of God? (Ruether)

Answer 37

Divine wisdom linked to Jesus
Wisdom in female terms
Messiah (word of God, Jesus) is more than a male part of God but is also the incarnation of wisdom, which is female (Sophia)

Question 38

What is Ruether’s concept of Gaia?

Answer 38

Eco-feminism = Gaia
Divinity linked to earth
God is not Gaia but she is recovering a concept of God she believes is found in Christianity in the ancient notion of Sophia, but which has been suppressed by patriarchal ideas about maleness

Question 39

How does Ruether attempt to give a truer picture of Imago dei?

Answer 39

Trying to recover human nature and full picture of the divine by balancing male and female in understanding of human nature and God

This is a truer reflection of image dei - people in image and likeness of God