LITMIR.BIZ

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Bishop Paul Moore of New York, an early advocate of women’s ordination in that Church, argued that the “maleness” of the deity might in some way be mitigated by the presence of female ministers.

God as Father and God as Son invoked by a male minister during worship creates in the unconscious, the intuitive, the emotive part of your belief, an unmistakable male God. However, when women begin to read the Scripture, when they preside at the Eucharist, when they wear the symbolic robes of Christ, this unconscious perception will begin to be redressed and the femininity of God will begin to be felt.42

      To this clumsy and confused thinking, Daphne Hampson provides us once more with a ready response.

The difficulty . . . was brought home to me some years ago in attending a eucharistic liturgy, which I believe had been written by Carter Heyward . . . Only women were present and the service was orientated towards women. In place of a sermon there was a time of quiet in which women present spoke to the theme of “creation,” some from the perspective of giving birth. How jarring it seemed then that, at the consecration, reference had necessarily to be made to the man Jesus of Nazareth: he had to take centre stage. Not simply was he mentioned, as men may well have been in the prayers of intercession, but he was actively made present as lord of the situation.43

      She is again making a point which would not sound out of place in the mouths of traditionalist controversialists, Eric Mascall say, or V. A. Demant. Like Hampson, they would emphasise the anamnesis of Jesus, which lies at the heart of the catholic understanding of the eucharist. They would then go on to say, which might equally be thought to be implicit in Hampson’s account of the Heyward “eucharist,” that this necessary anamnesis is amplified and more fully expressed when the minister of the rite is himself a man.

      * * *

      Theology, it is sometimes said, is the only academic discipline in which primitive remains a term of approbation. So if the maleness of Jesus and its symbolic impact has proved to be problematic for Christian feminists, no less so has been their relationship with the biblical and Christian past. Of course, feminist problems in relating to a patriarchalist past are not exclusive to Christians. In a ground-breaking book on women and drama in the age of Shakespeare, Lisa Jardine summarized two differing responses:

There appear currently to be two main lines of approach to Shakespeare’s drama within a feminist perspective . . . The first assumes that Shakespeare has earned his position at the heart of the traditional canon of English literature by creating characters who reflect every possible nuance of the richness and variety which is to be found in the world around us. His female characters in this view reflect accurately the whole range of specifically female qualities . . . The second line of approach assumes quite the opposite. Shakespeare’s society is taken to be oppressively chauvinistic—a chauvinism whose trace is to be found in innumerable passing comments on women in the plays.44

      For Shakespeare read Jesus—except that in the case of Jesus the two approaches have been melded into one, with a conspiracy theory to link them. Jesus was an egalitarian revolutionary, the theory goes, whose closest associates were so blinded by the ambient culture of misogyny that they could not grasp how radical he was. A male conspiracy, down the ages, has buried his insights under the dead weight of deepening patriarchy. Only in recent times has the truth about him come to light.

      It is strange that Biblical scholars and Church historians have been slow to point out the near absurdity of all this. It is an axiom of social anthropology that in other cultures and former times, ethical assumptions which we make without question would have seemed outlandish and unintelligible. Imagine trying to explain the principles of the RSPCA to the clientele of the Colosseum. And yet the belief that a Palestinian rabbi of the first century (and later the greatest and most influential of his pharisaical converts) embraced a doctrine which was unknown before the eighteenth century Enlightenment and did not gain general credence until the 1920s has somehow passed virtually unquestioned.

      Jesus, it is often said, was revolutionary in his attitude to women. Even the Roman Magisterium—eager no doubt to say something that might be construed as “positive”—has gone along with the notion.

[Jesus’s] attitude towards women was quite different from that of his milieu, and he deliberately and courageously broke with it. For example, to the great astonishment of his own disciples Jesus converses publicly with the Samaritan woman (cf. Jn 4:27); he takes no notice of the state of legal impurity of the woman who had suffered from haemorrhages (cf. Mt 9:20–22); he allows a sinful woman to approach him in the house of Simon the Pharisee (cf. Lk 7:37ff.); and by pardoning the woman taken in adultery, he means to show that one must not be more severe towards the fault of a woman than towards that of a man (cf. Jn 8:11). He does not hesitate to depart from the Mosaic Law in order to affirm the equality of the rights and duties of men and women with regard to the marriage bond (cf. Mk 10:2–11; Mt 19:3–9).45

      These claims are the subject of the next chapter. They prove, as we shall see, insubstantial if not totally unfounded. But take the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman as an example. It is not a story about Jesus’s attitude to women—indeed there are no stories in the Gospels “about” Jesus’s attitude to women. It is not even a story “about” Jesus’s relationship with a woman. It is hard to see what comfort a feminist might gain from it. The metaphorical association of Woman with marital and spiritual infidelity (“whoring after strange Gods” [cf. Hos 1:2]) looks suspiciously like misogyny, and the oblique references back to the meetings at wells of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, have disturbing patriarchalist overtones. It is by no means certain, what is more, that the now famous ending to the tale (“. . . they [the disciples] marveled that he was talking with a woman”) can support the conclusion which has recently been drawn from it. The most natural inference, surely, is not that the disciples were amazed at what Jesus was in the habit of doing, but astounded that he had broken with the habits of a lifetime! If there is a lesson to be learned here it is about the difficulties inherent in seeking guidance from such texts on matters which they were never intended to address and which are strictly irrelevant to them. The fact that Christians have been dealing with texts in precisely that way for centuries is no excuse.

An older generation of feminists was right: for them the Bible is uncomfortable territory. Who, after all, could dispute the patriarchal credentials of the culture of the Old Testament, where male circumcision is the rite of entry into the community of Israel, where the cultic community was restricted to men, and where even sacrificial victims were required to be male (Lev 1:3)? And the same is largely true of the New Testament. “There is no positive evidence,” says Hampson, “that Jesus saw anything wrong with the sexism of his day.”46 And Nicola Slee provides some interesting statistics.47 Of the main characters in Jesus’s parables in Mark none are women; in Matthew there are eighty-five characters, of whom twelve are women (but ten are bridesmaids in one story!); in Luke there are 108, of whom nine are women. And this poor rating is capped, as traditionalists never tire in pointing out, by the appointment of the Twelve—patriarchs of the New Israel, and a missed opportunity if ever there was one.

For Christian feminists, what is more, Lisa Jardine’s two conflicting approaches represent the clash of two contrasting cultures. Because Christianity is an historical religion in which “primitive” remains a term of approbation, more than nominal respect must be accorded the historical record. But sexual egalitarianism, as we have seen, is a recent development with its origins in the ideology of the Enlightenment. Church feminists, in consequence, find themselves co-belligerents with a class of persons whose posture toward the past might best be described as arrogance mingled with anger. “Men (sic) will never be free,” wrote Denis Diderot, “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”48

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