Feminist Theology

A few thoughts after listening to student presentations on feminist theology all morning. (I know, BTW, that there are all sorts and conditions of feminist theology.)

1) Rosemary Reuther says that Jesus’ maleness is an “accident,” on par with the accident of His Jewishness or the fact that he was a carpenter. But this is a HUGE claim. It implies that all redemptive history is similarly “accidental.” Once God had created the world, bringing Eve out of Adam, the trajectory was set for a new ADAM (“if there is a natural man, there is also a spiritual man”). The maleness of this new Adam is not an “accident,” but worked into the structure of redemptive history. Once sin enters, Yahweh promises that the “seed of the woman” (understood by Eve as a son) would be the redeemer. And Jewishness an “accident”?!? Once Yahweh called Abraham to be the bearer of the seed, then the Jewishness of the Messiah is set for good. The Messiah is going to be a Jewish MAN.

2) Of course, one could back this up a step and say that in a decretal sense God might have designed the world otherwise, chosen someone other than Abram, chosen to cause Adam to come from a rib of Eve, and the redeemer as a Bangladeshi woman. But that merely raises another difficulty for the feminist, namely, that the Incarnate One is eternally and irreducibly “Son” (not “daughter,” not “it”). Jesus’ maleness surely has something to do with the fact that He is eternal Son in the flesh. To deny this seems to imply a radical disjunction between the economy and the ontology.

3) Speaking of economy and ontology: Feminist theology can only work in a radically and thoroughly apophatic framework. In an analogical universe, the revelation of God bears some resemblance to God in Himself (distant though the analogy may be; even though the dissimilarity may infinitely transcend the similarity). For feminist theology, not even “Father” and “Son” can name something basically true about God. These are only human social roles projected onto a featureless something that we call God, a God which our human language cannot even remotely describe.

4) There seems to be a strong docetic strain in feminist Christology. Reuther suggests that Christ’s maleness is now an irrelevancy, since we no longer know Him according to the flesh but only according to the Spirit. But this might be taken to mean that Christ no longer has his male body; but He does, glorified now in heaven. This docetism runs contrary to the feminist interest in and emphasis upon the body – an odd contradiction.