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September 26, 2021 - March 20, 2022
Women’s refusal of the exclusive claim of the white male symbol of the divine arises from the well-founded demand to adhere to the holy mystery of God, source of the blessing of their own existence, and to affirm their own intrinsic worth.
But if they would ask me to draw God, I would draw my grandmother smiling. Because she is the only person that I believe has filled me or filled me so much that I can compare her with God. I would draw a picture of my grandmother with her hands open, smiling, as if to say, “Come with me because I am waiting for you.” God is strength for the lucha [struggle], strength to keep going, to encourage.
God’s indwelling nearness, spoken of as immanence in philosophical terms, is greatly neglected by classical theism. Far from being simply distant, above and beyond the world, however, Spirit-Sophia is the
living God at her closest to the world, pervading the whole and each creature to awaken life and mutual kinship. Not existence over and against but with and for, not domination but mutual love emerge as the highest value as the Spirit of God dwells within and around the world with all its fragility, chaos, tragedy, fertility, and beauty.
At root the difficulty lies in the fact that Christology in its story, symbol, and doctrine has been assimilated to the patriarchal world view, with the result that its liberating dynamic has been twisted into justification for domination. Historically, as the early church became inculturated in the Greco-Roman world, it gradually shaped itself according to the model of the patriarchal household and then to the model of the empire. The image of Christ consequently assumed contours of the male head of household or the imperial ruler, a move correlated with similar development in the
idea of church office. Christ was then viewed as the principle of headship and cosmic order, the ruling king of glory, the Pantocrator par excellence, whose heavenly reign sets up and sustains the earthly rule of the head of the family, empire, and church.5 Obedience to these authorities was obedience to Christ; disobedience to them called into question one’s allegiance to Christ himself. Thus coopted, the powerful symbol of the liberating Christ lost its subversive, redemptive significance.
In particular, when Jesus’ maleness, which belongs to his historical identity, is interpreted to be essential to his redeeming christic function and identity, then the Christ serves as a religious tool for marginalizing and excluding women.
The difficulty arises, rather, from the way Jesus’ maleness is construed in official androcentric theology and ecclesial praxis, a way that results in a christological view that effectively diminishes women.
For this mentality, the idea that the Word might have become female flesh is not even seriously imaginable, so thoroughly has androcentric Christology done its work of erasing the full dignity of women as christomorphic in the community of disciples.
the ends of the earth. Along with other forms of political and liberation theology, feminist theology repudiates an interpretation of the death of Jesus as required by God in repayment for sin.18 Such a view today is virtually inseparable from an underlying image of God as an angry, bloodthirsty, violent and sadistic father, reflecting the very worst kind of male behavior. Rather, Jesus’ death was an act of violence brought about by threatened human men, as sin, and therefore
the will of a gracious God. It occurred historically in consequence of Jesus’ fidelity to the deepest truth he knew, expressed in his message and behavior, which showed all twisted relationships to be incompatible with Sophia God’s shalom. Challenging the validity of powerful relations normed by dominance and submission, his liberating life bore the signature of his death; in that sense, suffering was most probable. What comes clear in the event, however, is not Jesus’ necessary passive victimization divinely decreed as a penalty for sin, but rather a dialectic of disaster and powerful human
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the parable that enacts Sophia-God’s participation in the suf...
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If in a patriarchal culture a woman had preached compassionate love and enacted a style of authority that serves, she would most certainly have been greeted with a colossal shrug. Is this not what women are supposed to do by nature? But from a social position of male privilege Jesus preached and acted this way, and herein lies the summons.
The crucified
Jesus embodies the exact opposite of the patriarchal ideal of the powerful man, and shows the steep price to be paid in the struggle for liberation.
The cross thus stands as a poignant symbol of the “kenosis of patriarchy,” the self-emptying of male dominating power in favor of the new humanity of com...
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Surely, anyone who wants to overemphasize Christ’s maleness in order to establish prerogatives of males (“priests”) over females has not understood Jesus as the liberator of all people, men and women, and has not understood the way he liberated us.
it becomes clear that the heart of the problem is not that Jesus was a man but that more men are not like Jesus,
Given the affirmation that the incarnation is inclusive of the humanity of all human beings of all races and historical conditions and both genders, it becomes clear that Jesus the Christ’s ability to be savior does not reside in his maleness but in his loving, liberating history in the midst of the powers of evil and oppression. In face of this, the trivialization introduced into the doctrine of the incarnation by androcentric stress on the maleness of Jesus’s humanity fully warrants the charge of heresy and even blasphemy currently being leveled against it.
When the intelligibility of the symbol of God as mother informs speech about divine mystery, then again, as in the case of Spirit and Jesus-Sophia, theology of God transforms some of the deficiencies of classical theism. Maternity with its creativity, nurturing, and warmth, its unbounded compassion and concern for justice, its sovereign power that protects, heals, and liberates, its all-embracing immanence, and its recreative energy shapes a new understanding of divine relationality, mystery, and liberating intent.
The true God exists as a mystery of communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. The diversity of the persons does not break up divine unity but reveals its profound richness, which is greater thanks to the distinction of the persons than it would be with a single subject alone.
the triune God who exists essentially in mutual inner relationships provides a different model for human interaction, pointing to a community without supremacy or subjection where differences flourish in the matrix of a relationship of equals.
Julian of Norwich, for example, writes: I understand three ways of contemplating motherhood in God. The first is the foundation of our nature’s creation; the second is his taking of our nature, where the motherhood of grace begins; the third is the motherhood at work. And in that, by the same grace, everything is penetrated, in length and in breadth, in height and in depth without end; and it is all one love.
God is God again as Jesus Christ, Sophia’s child and prophet, and yes, Sophia herself personally pitching her tent in the flesh of humanity to teach the paths of justice.
Relationality is the principle that at once constitutes each trinitarian person as unique and distinguishes one from another.
In Simone Weil’s evocative words, “Pure friendship is an image of the original and perfect friendship that belongs to the Trinity, and is the very essence of God.”
The mystery of God as Trinity, as final and perfect sociality, embodies those qualities of mutuality, reciprocity, cooperation, unity, peace in genuine diversity that are feminist ideals and goals derived from the inclusivity of the gospel message. The final symbol of the God as Trinity thus provides women with an image and concept of God that entails qualities that make God truly worthy of imitation, worthy of the call to radical discipleship that is inherent in Jesus’ message.
Blessed is She who spoke and the world became. Blessed is She. Blessed is She who in the beginning gave birth. Blessed is She who says and performs. Blessed is She who declares and fulfills. Blessed is She whose womb covers the earth. . . . Blessed is She who lives forever, and exists eternally. Blessed is She who redeems and saves. Blessed is Her Name.
Thus it is not accidental that classical theism insists on a concept of God with no real relation to the world, even when this is interpreted as an affirmation of divine transcendence. Unrelated and unaffected by the world, such a theistic God limns the
ultimate patriarchal ideal, the solitary, dominant male.
A third position, variously known as dialectical theism, neoclassical theism, or, more typically, panentheism, offers another, more congenial model. As defined in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, panentheism is “The belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but (as against pantheism) that this Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the
universe.”16 Here is a model of free, reciprocal relation: God in the world and the world in God, while each remains radically distinct. The relation is mutual while differences remain and are respected. As with classical theism, no proportion between finite creatures and divine mystery is set up; the disparity between them is absolute. But the absolute difference between Creator and creature is encircled by God, who is all in all.
To see the world dwelling in God is to play variations on the theme of women’s bodiliness and experience of pregnancy, labor and giving birth.
Dorothee Soelle sums up this view of many feminist theologians in her choice words:
But as a woman I have to ask why it is that human beings honor a God whose most important attribute is power, whose prime need is to subjugate, whose greatest fear is equality. . . . Why should we honor and love a being that does not transcend but only reaffirms the moral level of our male-dominated culture? Why should we honor and love this being, and what moral right do we have to do so if this being is in fact no more than an outsized man whose main ideal is to be independent and to have power?
Mary Daly has rightly observed, “Rage is not a stage. It is not something to be gotten over. It is a transformative, focusing force.”
“The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God it is a disaster.”
