Feminist Theology

An approach to theology that aims to give women their true value.

Feminist theology began as a critical analysis of the neglect of women’s experiences in Christian thinking and practice. Not only was traditional theology written by men with little regard for the distinctive voices of women, but much Christian theology was hatefully misogynistic. Tertullian’s remark that women were ‘the devil’s gateway’ was an extreme expression of an active misogyny at the heart of Christian theology.

Like feminism in general, feminist theology is not so much a distinct theory as a range of approaches and perspectives united by what one writer has called ‘an ethical commitment to giving women their true value’ (E. Wilson: Hidden Agendas, Tavistock, 1986). This commitment has found a range of expressions, from rights-based campaigns for equality, to radical ‘goddess’ theology, post-Christian feminism and lesbian feminism.

Although there were some earlier examples of feminist theology, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible (1895), it really took root in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of landmark books by Mary Daly (The Church and the Second Sex, 1968) and Kari Borresen (Subordination and Equivalence, 1968).

Inspired by secular feminism, feminist theologians started treating the Christian tradition with active suspicion. Church structures were criticised for the exclusion and oppression of women, theological language was scrutinised for sexism and patriarchy, and the very structures of theological reasoning, including the male conception of God, were subjected to feminist critique.

At the centre of these approaches was a re-reading of the Christian tradition – in particular, the Bible. For example, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983) tried to look through the layers of patriarchal (mis)interpretation to detect the voices of women within the Christian Scriptures. Fiorenza showed how the production, translation and interpretation of the biblical texts operated to oppress women: ‘A feminist reconstruction of history can no longer take patriarchal texts at face value but must critically interpret them in a feminist perspective.’

Although the critique of patriarchy was, and remains, very necessary, it has also been important for feminist theologians to present a constructive religious vision. For example, feminist critique exposed spirit–matter dualism as essentially sexist: the spirit was associated with the ‘rational’ male and matter with the ‘feminine’ body. This critique has been crucial to the development of numerous theologies of the body, sexuality, biology, bio-ethics and ecology.

One of the central issues has been the extent to which the traditions of the churches really provide adequate resources for a properly feminist theology. For some, like Sarah Coakley (Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, 2002), traditional trinitarian doctrine provides all the materials necessary for a feminist theology. But for others, the tradition must be radically adapted or supplemented with images of a feminine God, Christa (a feminine Christ), the figure of the Earth-goddess, or even the re-appropriation of witchcraft.

As with secular feminism, feminist theology has tended in the last decade to become ever more abstract and academic – and as a result, more distant from the practical campaigns for women’s justice and social reform that characterised so-called ‘First Wave’ and ‘Second Wave’ feminism. The future of feminist theology lies perhaps not only in new theoretical developments but also in a reconnection with practical issues of justice for women.

THINKERS

Mary Daly (1928– ): a radical feminist theologian who famously refused to admit male students to her classes at Boston College. In Beyond God the Father and subsequent works she argued that ‘If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.’ Daly used language and concepts in imaginative ways in order to disrupt patriarchy, which she believed was written into all our patterns of Western thought. She argued that we need to recover earlier concepts of God, particularly ‘negative theology’, Aquinas’ theology of Being and his conception of ‘God as a verb’.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1938– ): a pioneer of feminist interpretation of the Bible.

Daphne Hampson (1944– ) has argued in Theology and Feminism that feminism must follow a post-Christian trajectory because the Christian tradition, centred on a male Messiah, simply cannot be redeemed. Hampson says she has ‘rejected the Christian myth … The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection.’

Carter Heyward (1945– ): a lesbian feminist and one of the 11 Episcopal women ‘illegally’ ordained in Philadelphia in 1974. Heyward has drawn on Martin Buber’s theology to develop a theology of ‘right relation’: ‘We are born in relation, we live in relation, we die in relation’ to one another, to the cosmos and to God.

John Knox (1505–72): a Reformation theologian and the author of a virulently misogynistic text entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), in which he argued that ‘to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature; an insult to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’

Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936– ): a pioneer of feminist theology who criticised traditional Christology as patriarchal and anti-Semitic. Ruether said we must go back to the Jesus tradition of the Gospels to find the resources for a feminist theology.

Tertullian (155–230): one of the earliest Christian theologians, he was infamous for the misogynistic views expressed in On Female Fashion and other works.

IDEAS

Androcentrism: taking maleness as normative.

Ecofeminism: the view that the oppression of women and the oppression of nature are interconnected.

First Wave feminism: the era of campaigns for women’s rights, typified by the Suffragettes.

The hermeneutic of suspicion: an approach to the interpretation of Scripture and tradition that presumes the existence of oppression and exclusion. It has been used self-consciously by Schüssler Fiorenza in her critique of the Christian tradition.

Inclusive language: language that openly includes women.

Patriarchy (literally, ‘the rule of the father’): a term that refers to a society ruled by men.

Phallocentrism: a term used to describe the priority given to the masculine in a culture or society.

Post-Christian feminism: the position, argued by Daphne Hampson and Mary Daly (in later years), that feminism must lead us beyond Christianity.

Post-feminism: a critique of feminism that blames some earlier feminist approaches for the continued oppression of women.

Second Wave feminism: a period (the late 1960s to the mid 1980s) in the history of feminism that was concerned with the transformation of the roles that women play in public and private life.

Third Wave feminism: a period (in the 1990s) of more philosophical feminism that focused on connecting feminist concerns with general and global questions of oppression and justice.

Womanist Theology: a distinct perspective that seeks to recognise, affirm and empower black women in determining the character of Christian religion.

BOOKS

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: toward a feminist theology (Beacon Press, 1983)

Lisa Isherwood and Dorothea McEwan (eds.), An A to Z of Feminist Theology (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996)

Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Introducing Womanist Theology (Orbis Books, 2002)

Imelda Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought from the Second Wave to ‘Post Feminism’ (Edinburgh University Press, 1995)