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Baptismal Fluid1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Gerard Loughlin
Gerard Loughlin
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, Armstrong Building, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England
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Extract

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 1998 , pp. 261 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1998

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References

2 Webster, Alison, Found Wanting: Women, Christianity and Sexuality (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 5Google Scholar; Thatcher, Adrian, Liberating Sex: A Christian Sexual Theology (London: SPCK, 1993), p.21Google Scholar. Karl Barth suggests that Galatians 3:28 may have been the basis for a claimed sexual equality in the liturgical practice of the Corinthian church. See Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, edited by Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), vol. III, pt.2, p.309Google Scholar.

3 Webster, Found Wanting, ch.1.

4 Colossians 3:18–19; Ephesians 5:22–8.

5 See The Dialogues of Plato, translated by Allen, R. E. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), vol.2, pp.130–134 (189c–193e)Google Scholar.

6 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1988)Google Scholar. See further Paul, John II, Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catecheses on the Book of Genesis (Boston: St Paul Books, 1981)Google Scholar

7 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, p.37Google Scholar.

8 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, pp.37–38Google Scholar.

9 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, p.39Google Scholar.

10 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, pp.39–40Google Scholar.

11 Paul, John II, ‘Letter to Women’, The Tablet, 15 July 1995, 917–919 (p.917)Google Scholar.

12 See Chanter, Tina, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray' s Rewriting of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1995), p.78Google Scholar.

13 Irigaray, Luce, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine: Interview’, in The Irigaray Reader, edited by Whitford, Margaret (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 118–132 (p.128)Google Scholar.

14 Irigaray, , ‘Power of Discourse’, p.130Google Scholar.

15 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, pp.64–85Google Scholar.

16 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, p.81Google Scholar.

17 Paul, John II, Mulieris Dignitatem, p.67Google Scholar.

18 Irigaray, , ‘Power of Discourse’, p.131Google Scholar.

19 Irigaray, Luce, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, translated by Martin, Alison (London: Routledge, 1996), p.63Google Scholar.

20 Irigaray, , I Love to You, p.65Google Scholar.

21 Irigaray, , I Love to You, p.35Google Scholar.

22 This is also the basis for Irigaray' s strategic essentializing of woman; not that she denies the singularity of woman, but that she recognises the constructed nature of the ‘subject’, and seeks to counter the only subject permitted under patriarchy — the masculine subject — by placing another alongside it. See further Schor, Naomi, ‘This Essentialism Which is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray’, in The Essential Difference, edited by Schor, Naomi and Weed, Elizabeth (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 40–62Google Scholar.

23 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.286Google Scholar.

24 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.285Google Scholar.

25 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.287Google Scholar.

26 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.288Google Scholar.

27 Barth, , Church Dogmatics III, 2, p.289Google Scholar.

28 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.292Google Scholar.

29 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.297Google Scholar.

30 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.299Google Scholar.

31 To these ‘copies’ Barth, (Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.309Google Scholar) also adds the relation of ‘apostle (Paul) and church (Corinthians)’.

32 Barth, likens it to the traversal of a landscape (Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.313)Google Scholar.

33 Irigaray, , I Love to You, p. 62Google Scholar.

34 Ephesians 5:21.

35 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.313Google Scholar. This point is made even more forcibly by John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, pp.90–3. ‘The awareness that in marriage there is mutual “subjection of the spouses out of reverence for Christ”, and not just that of the wife to the husband, must gradually establish itself in hearts, consciences, behaviour and customs’ (p.92).

36 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III, 2, p.314Google Scholar. ‘Not man but woman represents the reality which embraces all those who are addressed, whether they be wives or husbands, old or young, slaves or masters, which claims even the apostle himself in his peculiar position, and from which he thinks and speaks and admonishes them to think and act’. The same point is recognised by John Paul II (p.95).

37 Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Burke, Carolyn and Gill, Gillian C. (London: The Athlone Press, [1984] 1993), pp.113–114Google Scholar.

38 Once the relation of Christ to church is conceived according to a spousal or sexual symbolic, it is necessary to make woman a mobile symbol, in order to avoid making Christ a ‘woman’ or all Christian males ‘homosexual’.

39 In terms borrowed from Paul Ricoeur, the scriptures may be newly ‘configured’ for liberation and the church ‘refigured’ for the articulation of that beatitude which is the ‘equality’ of the heavenly household. On Ricoeur see further Loughlin, Gerard, Telling God's Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theobgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.139–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for a related discussion of Ricoeurian narratology and sexual difference see Anderson, Pamela, ‘Myth, Mimesis and Multiple Identities: Feminist Tools for Transforming Theology’, Literature and Theology, 10 (1996), pp.112–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.