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The Challenge of Feminist Theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
The feminist critique of theology is a radical and extensive one. This article examines contemporary feminist scholarship as it relates to three strategic issues in theological anthropology: (1) traditional interpretations of woman's nature; (2) the long-standing tendency to justify woman's social inferiority on the grounds of her “natural” inferiority; and (3) the complete oversight of the area of woman's experience. It will then be shown that this particular critique comes to a point of convergence in theological method, thus creating fundamental questions about accepted principles now directing the theologian's work.
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References
1 See Turner, Pauline and Cooke, Bernard, “Feminist Thought and Systematic Theology,” Horizons 11/1 (Spring 1984), 125–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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4 For many Catholic women, awareness of just how misogynist the Church's theological tradition has been began with a reading of studies which included detailed historical summaries, e.g., Daly, Mary, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)Google Scholar, Tavard, George, Woman in Christian Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ed., Religion and Sexism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).Google Scholar
5 The matter of the imago Dei is an exceedingly important one, and one that deserves in-depth study. The idea that man and woman in some way share in the divine nature is absolutely fundamental to the whole Christian economy. While today it is presumed that men and women equally possess the image of God, a survey of the earliest centuries shows there has been an obvious difference of opinion about this. Some of the Antiochene fathers (e.g., Diodore of Tarsus, Ambrosiaster) held that woman did not possess the image at all. There were also those who, following Paul (1 Cor ll:3ff.), believed that the image in women was different than that in Adam because while “Adam was formed immediately to the image of God, the female was formed immediately to the image of man … therefore to the image of God mediately, through the image of God that is the male,” cited in Walter, J.Burghardt, S.J., , The Image of God in Man According to Cyril of Alexandria (Woodstock, MD: Woodstock College Press, 1957), pp. 134–35.Google Scholar And of course, Aquinas's own Aristotelian categories seem to commit him to the view that God's image in woman is different, i.e., less, than it is in man. Since the rational soul is proportioned to the body, and woman's body is inferior to man's, the feminine rational soul is consequently less perfect than the masculine. See Borresen, Kari Elisabeth, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Woman in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (Washington: University Press of America, 1981), pp. 315–16.Google Scholar
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7 Borresen, p. 29.
8 Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 419; Gen. c. Manich. II, 13, 18;Google ScholarDemor. eccl. cath.I, 30, 63.Google Scholar Augustine speculates that this may be due to the fact that because Adam was formed first, he enjoyed intellectual superiority as far as knowledge is concerned, De Gen. ad litt. XI, 42.Google Scholar
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27 Aristotle, for example, conceived the distinction between male and female natures to lie in woman's lack of an appropriate degree of soul heat: because she is “unable to concoct, or cook her menstrual blood to the final state of refinement, i.e., semen,” the philosopher concluded that woman represents only partial humanity; see Whitbeck, Caroline, “Theories of Sex Difference,” Philosophical Forum 5 (1973–1974), 56.Google Scholar
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32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p. 53.
34 Ibid., p. 56.
35 Ibid., p. 58.
36 Ibid.
37 E.g., John Chrysostom, Discourse 4 on Genesis.
38 Clark, Elizabeth, Women in the Early Church (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983).Google Scholar Augustine and Aquinas are among those who argue that with the fall, that subordination was merely increased.
39 In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton proposed to publish a corrective feminist interpretation of the Bible when she realized that rather than being an ally, scripture became a potent political weapon against women's struggle for liberation; see Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar
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51 While there is a growing body of work reflecting feminist efforts to restate the basic Christian meanings in more inclusive terms, I will limit my discussion here to the specific points of critique developed in what I consider to be classics of feminist theological analysis, i.e., the works of Valerie Saiving Goldstein and Judith Plasko w. At the same time, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, the subjects of Plaskow's study, represent the mainstream of modern Protestant theological interpretation.
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56 Ibid., pp. 84-86.
57 Ibid., p. 87.
58 Ibid., p. 89.
59 Goldstein, quoted in Plaskow, pp. 87-88.
60 Plaskow, p. 90.
61 Ibid., p. 157.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., p. 175; at one point, Plaskow suggests that perhaps “one must be a bit Pelagian to be faithful to women's experience!
65 Goldstein, p. 102.
66 In the area of psychology, one of the most important studies is that of Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, who argues that women tend to have a more positive view of the world than men because of their earliest experiences. Gilligan also insists that this helps to explain why women also construe problems of morality differently. A significant new work on the subject of women's experience is Belenky, Mary Field, Clinchy, Blythe McVicker, Goldberger, Nancy Rule, and Tarule, Jill Mattuck, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986).Google Scholar A basic thesis here is that while men regularly use the metaphor of sight to describe the experience of knowing, of discovering truth, women are more likely to explain this in terms of speaking/hearing, of “gaining a voice.”
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71 Daly, Mary, however, suggests that under the patriarchal system of the academy, “Method has wiped out women's questions so totally that even women have not been able to hear and formulate our own questions to meet our own experiences” (Beyond God the Father, pp. 11–12).Google Scholar
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74 Ibid., p. xxiv.
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77 “My contention will be that all significant explicitly religious language and experience (the ‘religions’) and all significant implicitly religious characteristics of our common experience (the ‘religious dimension’) will bear at least the ‘family resemblance’ of articulating or implying a limit-experience, a limit-language, or a limit-dimension” (Tracy, p. 93).
78 Ibid., p. 106.
79 Ibid., p. 107.
80 Ibid.
81 See, e.g., Gilligan, pp. 7-8.
82 Ibid., p. 8.
83 Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 167.Google Scholar
84 Ibid., p. 38.
85 Gilligan, p. 29.
86 Ibid.
87 See Tracy, pp. 119-45.
88 Ruether, Rosemary, “Is a New Consensus Possible?” in Swidler, , ed., Consensus in Theology?, pp. 63–68.Google Scholar
89 Ibid., p. 67.