Feminist Christology

                              Feminist Perspectives

Liberal

-Freedom of choice, equality of opportunity, freedom of competition, the rights of the individual.

Agitation for legal change through political action for example Miss Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters decided to create a 'Womens social and political Union' in 1903 rather than go with the peaceful protests of Millicent Fawcett. They would not wait for the vote they tried to get through violence. Miss Davidson committed suicide and other suffragettes chained themselves to palace gates and attacked shops and MPs.

Marxist

-Women’s oppression is a direct result of structural inequality not lack of choice. Structural inequality arises out of capitalist economies where individuals are pitted against each other to compete for scares resources (Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate ).

-Women’s oppression is a structural necessity for the workings of capitalism.  They are exploited through class and gender. The latter as a result of the ideologies of ‘motherhood’ and ‘family.’ The solution is to transform consciousness.

Difference

- some feminists assert that there are essential differences between men and women to do with biology, and physical strength, which is different from liberal and marxist feminists who stress the need for equality.

- Some feminists such as Mary Daly believe that these differences such as the biological differences have a significant impact on the culture of women and could increase the view that these allow women to believe they are superior.

- Difference feminsts therefore stress separatism as a strategy over patriarchy.

Post Structural

- These feminists argue that sex and gender are social and cultural constructs and therefore reject biological determinism and capitalist reductionism.

-Difference cannot be reduced to 'essence'

- Nicholson argues that the categories of maleness and femaleness are not fixed but are 'discursive'. The focus is on the range of male and female constructs and how they are struggled over.

Post Feminists

- Not all men are dominators and not all women are oppressed

- Success of women's movement in terms of pay, culture, education, marriage and divorce laws as a sign of progress

-Rosalind Coward and other feminists believe there is still a war to be won, but with some significant victories, it is necessary to change the nature of the discussion on sex and gender. They call for a constructive dialogue between men and women to make more of a structural challenge.

Feminist Christology

-Makes women's experience the basis for Christological reflection

(Contextual theology – God is at work in social-historical world as well as scripture. Inter-textual approach necessary for transformation.)

-Challenge the centering of maleness as norm in Christological discourse and overcoming binary oppositions in Christian thought that lead to the othering of women.

-Seek to overturn patriarchy but also build new relationships between men and women by developing new images of Jesus.

But it is complex...

First, women from different situations have experienced their embodiment as something negative in many Christian traditions. Western Theology in particular has been based on a dualistic worldview that placed soul over body and male over female. Eg) In Early Christian writings women were seen as 'the gatewell to hell' and 'less than male'. Even though Christianity is an incarnational religion, it has too often been uncomfortable with the body, especially with the task of women to give birth to the next generation. Jesus' maleness has often been used as an argument against the full humanity of women. ' The doctrine that only a perfect male form can incarnate God fully and be salvific makes our individual llives in female bodies a prison against God and denies our actual,sensual,changing selves as the locus of divine activity.' (Rita Nashima Brock)

Second, women from different contexts have experienced oppression. Patterns of domination and submmission vary but they are present worldwide. The headship of Christ over his body the Church, reflected in the headship of the husband over his wife, has often legitimised the subordination of women.

Third, interrelatedness has been part of the experience of women. Women have traditionally found identity in relation to others as Mothers,Wives, Sisters and Daughters. In the past, a single male individual could represent all humanity. In current times, however, the interrelatedness of all life, including creation, has come to the fore; one of the impetuses has been the emergence of process thought.

(Moltmann insists that according to biblical ideas, what makes us 'imago dei' is not the soul apart from the body. The image of God consists of men and women in their wholeness, in their full, sexually specific community with one another. God is not known in the iner chamber of the heart or at a solitary place but in the true community of women and men. The experience of God is 'the social experienceof the self and the personal experience of sociality'.)

Institutionalised Marginality

 Chalcedonian Creed

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body; consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.