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seems to have held that the sum total of the teachings of Judaism and Christianity amounted to the rabbinical charge to love God and neighbor. The rest—the election of the Jews, the divinity of Christ—was mere persiflage. “Religion stands in no need of the trappings of superstition. On the contrary its glory is diminished when it is embellished with such fancies.” Thomas Jefferson famously encouraged Joseph Priestley to compile an edition of the gospels which excised the miracles and omitted the resurrection; and when Priestley reneged on the project, he did it himself. “I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”29

      Hampson differs. She sees that kerygma cannot so readily be separated from mythos. And rather surprisingly, she quotes C. S. Lewis approvingly to that effect:

      Hampson goes on to quote Austin Farrer, for whom the images are given in the same way.

      Those familiar with his work will know that Farrer expands the same point, with characteristic depth of perception, in his English appreciation of Bultmann.

      For Farrer, as for Hampson, what is conveyed is certainly not identical with, but nevertheless is clearly shaped by, the concretion. Christ, fulfilling the archetypal images, is both King and Victim. But he is not less a king because he is a victim; for the Cross is the consummation of his reign. “Concretion,” Farrer is saying, is effected, not merely by employing the images; but by living and fulfilling them. Which is precisely what Jesus did and the Christian is called to do. It is the tragedy of the arguments in favor of women’s ordination that they have sloganized Galatians 3:28 and paid so little attention to the fifth chapter of the letter to the Ephesians. There, Paul portrays the marital bond as an acted parable of the divine love—of Christ’s love for the Church. Only when the imagery is put into action is its truth experienced and known. The existential reality is both sweeter and more bitter than the images of prophecy.

      A similar idea is developed in Inter Insigniores, the declaration of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the question of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood, which was approved by Pope Paul VI on October 15, 1976 (less than a month after the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate).

      And traditionalists have made a related point by reminding exegetes that scripture is, to a large extent, narrative. It is itself a parable. That the principal protagonists in the tale are male cannot be said to be insignificant. Different protagonists, after all, would mean a different story.

      Hampson agrees:

      The observation is simple and telling. Sex, says Hampson, is the great “cutting” of mankind (the Latin root means “to cut,” as in “section” and “secateurs”). It transcends cultural and racial boundaries and is deeply rooted in the facts of procreation. It is this common experience of sexual difference, located in biology and rich in cultural and literary associations, which allows the myth of Oedipus, for example, to speak to a nineteenth century

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