Post-Christian Feminisms

POST-CHRISTIAN FEMINISMS This book explores the impact and contribution of post-theories in the field of Christian feminist theology. Post-theory is an important and cutting-edge discursive field which has revolutionized the production of knowledge in both feminism and theology. This book fills a gap by providing a text that can make authoritative statements on the use and status of post-theory in feminist theology, and secondly it makes an on-going contribution to the discourse of Christian feminist theology and its liberation agenda. Distinguished and established scholars contribute conclusive essays on the most recent and exciting developments in post-theory, feminism and theology.

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Post-Christian Feminisms A Critical Approach

Edited by LISA ISHERWOOD University of Winchester, UK KATHLEEN MCPHILLIPS University of Western Sydney, Australia

© Lisa Isherwood and Kathleen McPhillips 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Lisa Isherwood and Kathleen McPhillips have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Post-Christian feminisms : a critical approach 1. Feminist theology I. Isherwood, Lisa II. McPhillips, Kathleen 230’.082 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Post-Christian feminisms : a critical approach / edited by Lisa Isherwood and Kathleen McPhillips. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7546-5380-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Feminist theology. 2. Postmodernism— Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Isherwood, Lisa. II. McPhillips, Kathleen. BT83.55.P67 2007 230.082—dc22 2006034966 ISBN 978-0-7546-5380-6

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Contributors

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Introduction Lisa Isherwood and Kathleen McPhillips 1 2 3 4

5

6

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Beyond Reason: Towards a Post-Christian Philosophy of Religion Beverley Clack

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The ‘Post’- Age of Belief: Wither or Whither Christianity? Pamela Sue Anderson

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Ecofeminist Thea/logies and Ethics: A Post-Christian Movement? Rosemary Radford Ruether

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Material Elements: The Matter of Women, The Matter of Earth, The Matter of God Anne Elvey

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Who’s Been Reading MY Bible? Post-structuralist Hermeneutics and Sacred Text Janet Wootton

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Post-Christian Hermeneutics: The Rise and Fall of Female Subjectivity in Theological Narrative J’annine Jobling

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The Bi/girl Writings: From Feminist Theology to Queer Theologies Marcella Althaus-Reid

105

8

Our Lady of Perpetual Succour: Mother of Phallic Fetishes? [Queering the Queen of Heaven] Lisa Isherwood 117

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De-colonizing the Sacred: Feminist Proposals for a Post-Christian, PostPatriarchal Sacred Kathleen McPhillips 129

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Melting Hearts of Stone Mary T. Condren

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11 12 13 14

A Third Way: Explicating the Post in Post-Christian Feminism Frances Gray and Kathleen McPhillips

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Re-Membering Jesus: A Post-colonial Feminist Remembering Satoko Yamaguchi

179

Jesus Past the Posts: An Enquiry into Post-metaphysical Christology Lisa Isherwood

201

The Return of the Living Dead Elizabeth Stuart

211

Bibliography Index

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List of Contributors Marcella Althaus-Reid is Professor of Contextual Theology at the University of Edinburgh. A member of the advisory board of the international journal Concilium, Professor Althaus-Reid is also associate editor of the journal Studies in World Christianity: the Edinburgh Review of Theology and Religion. Pamela Sue Anderson is Reader in Philosophy of Religion, University of Oxford, and Fellow in Philosophy, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. She is author of Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, 1998), as well as author and editor of numerous articles on recent aspects of feminist philosophical debates in analytical and continental philosophy of religion. Her current research is for A Philosophy of Love: ‘The Heart Has Its Reasons...’ (forthcoming, 2009). Beverley Clack is Reader in Philosophy of Religion at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, coedited with Pamela Sue Anderson (Blackwell, 2004); Sex and Death: A Reappraisal of Human Mortality (Polity Press, 2002); Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Macmillan, 1999); and The Philosophy of Religion, co-authored with Brian R. Clack (Polity Press, 1998; a fully revised second edition of this book is to be published in 2008). She is currently working on an introduction to Freud for OneWorld and a monograph on Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Religion for Ashgate. Mary Condren studied at the University of Hull, Boston College and Harvard Divinity School where she is also a Research Associate in Women and Religion. She is currently National Director of the Institute for Feminism and Religion, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published extensively in feminist theology, spirituality, and on gender, religion and violence, and is the author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland (Harper Collins, 1989; New Island Books, Dublin, 2002). Having offered courses, workshops, and lectures all over the world on sacrifice, gender and war, she is currently completing a book on the topic, as well as another on female horizontal violence. Anne Elvey is an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is author of An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm (Mellen, 2005). Her current research is on the materiality of biblical texts.

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Frances Gray holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She teaches Philosophy at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia. She is the author of Jung, Irigaray, Individuation: Philosophy Analytical Psychology and the Question of the Feminine (Routledge, 2007) and several journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a book on the phenomenology of transcendent experience. Lisa Isherwood is Professor of Feminist Liberation Theologies, University of Winchester and Executive Editor of the international journal, Feminist Theology. She is author or editor of 14 books including The Power of Erotic Celibacy (T&T Clark, 2006); Liberating Christ (Pilgrim, 1999); and The Fat Jesus (DLT, 2008). Her research and teaching interests include feminist theology; queer theology; gender, psychology and religion; body theology; Celtic Christianity and spirituality and she has published widely in these areas. J’annine Jobling is Associate Professor in Theology, Philosophy and Religion at Liverpool Hope University. Her interests focus on the interface between religion, philosophy and literature, especially within the contexts of feminism and postmodernism. Her current work is on expressions of contemporary spirituality in fantasy fiction for young adults, Fantastic Spiritualities (Continuum, forthcoming 2008). Her publications include Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Theological Context: Restless Readings (Ashgate, 2002); Women and the Divine, co-edited with Gillian Howie (Palgrave, forthcoming 2008); Theological Liberalism. Creative and Critical, co-edited with Ian Markham (SPCK, 2000); and Theology and the Body: gender, text and ideology, co-edited with Robert Hannaford (Gracewing, 1999). Kathleen McPhillips is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. She has written extensively in the area of women and religion. She is editor (with Lynne Hume) of Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment (Ashgate, 2006) and has published recently in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Feminist Theology and International Journal of Children’s Spirituality. Rosemary Radford Ruether is Carpenter Emerita Professor of Feminist Theology at Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, as well as the Georgia Harkness Emerita Professor of Applied Theology at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. She has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a scholar, teacher, and activist in the Roman Catholic Church, and is well known as a groundbreaking figure in Christian feminist theology. Her publications include Sexism and God-Talk (Beacon Press, 1983); In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing, co-edited with Rosemary Skinner Keller (HarperCollins, 1995); and The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, with Herman J. Reuther (2nd edition, Fortress Press, 2002).

List of Contributors

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Elizabeth Stuart is Professor of Christian Theology and Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer, University of Winchester. She is an internationally acknowledged authority on theologies of sexuality and gender and has published extensively in the fields of feminist and queer theology. She edits the academic journal Theology and Sexuality. Janet Wootton is Director of Studies for the Congregational Federation, having taught Hebrew Scriptures and Biblical Languages for many years. She has ministered in rural and inner city churches, and is writer of hymns and other worship material. She serves on the editorial boards of Feminist Theology, The International Congregational Journal and Worship Live, and writes and speaks on feminist theology, biblical studies, worship and mission. Satoko Yamaguchi is a feminist theologian. She has studied in Tokyo, Boston and has a Doctor of Ministry from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, USA. She is currently a Lecturer at Japan Biblical Theological Seminary (Protestant), Central Theological College (Anglican), Keisen Women’s University (Protestant), and University of Sacred Heart (Catholic); all in Tokyo, Japan. In 2000 she cofounded and works as a co-director of Center for Feminist Theology and Ministry in Japan (Tokyo). Her publications include Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Orbis, 2002), and Toward a Justice on Sexuality & Life (Shinyko, forthcoming). Mary and Martha earned the ‘2003 Book Award’ from the Catholic Press Association in Canada and the US. Satoko has also translated selected works of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza into Japanese.

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Introduction Edited by Lisa Isherwood and Kathleen McPhillips

The aim of this book is to explore the impact and contribution of post-theories in relation to the field of Christian feminist theology. It is a particular opportunity from which to consider the multiple intersections between post-theory and Christian feminist studies in theology, as well as the contribution of particular authors to the immense and urgent questions of emancipation, ethics and community. Post-theory continues to be a heavily used, important and cutting-edge discursive field which has revolutionized the production of knowledge in both feminism and theology. Feminist theologies have benefited, utilized and created new theologies and critical analyses via post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, post-feminism and postbiblical discourses. What is central to these discourses is the destabilization and deconstruction of theology and feminism as unitary, singular accounts of knowledge which prioritize meta-theory and meta-ontology. ‘Post’ signifies destabilization of not only the creation and structure of western knowledges but also of western – even global – political, economic and symbolic systems. Post--theory problematizes history and, in particular colonialisms, exposes gender, ethnicity and race as social constructions and provides an account of religion as emerging from modernity, opens up the field of theological enquiry, and deconstructs the relationship between the natural and the social.1 Religion and theology as discursive formations are rendered into social formations which have histories, construct ideologies, are embedded in power relations, locate truth in relation to power, and expose the many voices and experiences that construct discourse. Feminism is also problematized. As Ellen Armour demonstrates, while feminism has initially offered a politics of resistance to different oppressions, it has often been blind to assumptions about race and its inter-relations with gender. Armour provides an excellent example of the uses of deconstruction using the work of Derrida and Irigaray in relation to exploring the difficulties that feminism encounters with race. Although post-theory is established in language and institution, analyzing the current historical period continues to be problematic. We may describe this period as one of late modernity or post-modernity or more specifically late capitalism or postcolonial. All these discourses are engaged in questions of definition and analysis but there is little doubt that we find ourselves living in a time of immense political, 1 Ellen Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Pui-lan Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 2005).

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economic, symbolic and ecological instability, witnessing the deterioration and fragmentation of modernity and all its imperfect forms. ‘Post’ allows a place from which to theorize, reflect and strategize in relation to these processes of fragmentation and change, much of which has been rapid and violent. And as we state above, the impact of post-theory on what is commonly known as ‘systems of knowledge’ have been powerful and destabilizing. For the purposes of this book and the accounts of post-theory in relation to Christian feminisms and theology, ‘post’ does not signal either a knowledge or social practice after modernity. Rather ‘post’ signifies the processes of fragmentation and destabilization of the central discourses and structures of modernity: colonialism, race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion and capitalism. Feminist theologies and religious studies are in conversation with these social formations, with a critical view to understanding how modernity both constructs and situates belief and tradition, reads sacred texts and constructs meaning. Hence the term ‘post-Christian’ signifies a destabilization of what could be considered a stable meta-discourse (Christianity) through a series of interjections including feminist, post-colonial and psychoanalytic. The term `post-Christian’ points towards a condition of the unravelled nature of Christianity; of the breakdown of duality as the principle organizing force of knowledge particularly through disruption to the relationship between believer and institution. Post-Christian feminisms suggest an immediate engagement with issues of definition, subjectivity and identity, ethics and meta-theology. In fact, such a discourse has been seriously derailed by feminist interjections. Questions of power, of the political disruption caused by the periphery claiming rights of speech and enfranchisement; of the body asserting autonomy; of counter claims to rationality as the dominant form of critical engagement; of indigenous and ethnic struggles for independence; the recognition of multiple gender identities; of difference among and between women – all such discourses are premised on the powerful destabilization proposed by post-theoretical interjections. The book thus begins with the condition of the unravelled nature of Christianity; of the destabilization of duality as the principle organizing force of knowledge; of the critique of biblical text as utter truth; of the emergence of multiple translations of text; of the operations of power in and around biblical interpretation; and of the particular and limited location of authorship. Post-theory asserts uncertainty as the only certainty. But this book is not about celebrating critique as the only form of authentic knowledge: it recognizes that new ways of thinking and new forms of political action are emerging. This book very much hopes to make a contribution to documenting and exploring emergent knowledges, both in terms of identifying creative emancipatory possibilities and recognizing reformulated attempts at closure and discrimination. Feminist theology is a central object of critique in many of the chapters. While recognizing that as a discipline or discursive terrain, feminist theology has made vital contributions to re-thinking subjectivity, tradition and cultural change, it has also been caught between and within disciplines, particularly theology as a metadiscourse, and feminism as a political, if flawed, practice. The essays in this collection recognize that particular disciplines or fields of knowledge provide important jumping off points for analysis.

Introduction

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In this book, contributors use the term ‘post’ in two central ways. First in a temporal sense, to indicate a specific historical time period – late modernity – which has generated particular forms of politics and knowledge. Whether we are past a period called late modernity we believe is not the central question; rather, the continuing documentation and analysis of social, economic and religious change is what matters most. Edward Said indicated that one of the difficulties of talking about a post-colonial age is that it could mask the re-inscription of neo-colonial forms.2 This argument is just as relevant to post-Christian and post-feminist articulations. New forms of Christianity may in fact be articulations of particular power arrangements that re-inscribe tradition and faith in oppressive ways. Feminisms can be powerful accounts that are relevant to only particular groups of women. Likewise, processes of modernity such as liberalism, democracy and capitalism are more recent in third world and emergent nations, which have existed under unjust political regimes for centuries. ‘Post’ in a temporal sense is then quite limited, power is transitional, or at least specific, unstable and changing. There may be particular sites in which ‘post’ equates with after-an-event, but these are not contingent or even linear. For example, there is no way in which one could argue for a case of post-capitalism; rather, the forms of global capitalism and in particular corporatization and commodification, emerge from previous forms of capitalism, such as state-based monopolies. Secondly, post-theory has come to be associated with strategic reading practices that engage texts as sources to be deconstructed and from which ideologies that construct texts can be exposed and critiqued. This has been particularly powerful in feminist theologies and, we would argue, possibly more pertinent to the use of posttheory than the temporal logistic. However, such reading practices emerge within particular historical periods and are responses to current concerns and injustices and so we argue that the two readings of ‘post’ must sit together. Returning to the question of ‘post’ as after, there has been intense discussion regarding the positioning of post-theory as either ‘after’ or ‘within’ modernity/ colonialism/feminism.3 But what if ‘post’ were to signify ‘between’ or ‘engaged with’ or ‘destabilizing of’? Politically, it would be difficult to argue with any authority that Christianity in all its contemporary forms constitutes, in any sense, an after-faith, or after-tradition practice. Indeed, it is continually being re-born and re-imagined within the logistics of global economic and religious symbolic systems. One needs only to consider the revitalization and success of fundamentalist churches and their popularity – particularly with young people – to understand just how powerful this form of Christianity is becoming. It influences political leaders and systems4 and, as we are daily witness to, Bush organizes his responses to world events in relation to a fundamentalist Christianity which underpins a moralism of triumphalist white, western male dominance as the norm. Fundamentalist Christian churches are one of 2 Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, p. 2. 3 Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonialism’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 291–304. 4 Marion Maddox, God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005).

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the fastest growing religious congregations in the West, and amassing property and wealth which they understand theologically as part of God’s plan for the faithful. They offer their congregations entertainment, security and safety and a space in which the hard questions will be suspended. Their tithing system is not only financial but also symbolic; you exchange money and an unquestioning loyalty to a white male God for stability and security.5 This is a Christianity that informs contemporary western democracies and capitalism as well as global economies. More than this, it is a form of Christianity that is purposively made for global capitalism; encouraging accumulation of wealth, commodification of belief, and salvation for individual souls. It is almost as if it is gearing up for the New World and all its new formations of social practice whatever they might be. In a very real sense, we can argue that these kinds of fundamentalist Christianities which support the continuation of the USA as world leaders and deplore religious tolerance and economic justice constitute a post-Christian response to ‘traditional’ Christianity. This takes on a more historical sense when we look at Weber’s argument6 that the practice of seventeenth-century Calvinism in some parts of Germany utilized the emerging ethos of capitalism, where to save money and accumulate wealth signified piety, grace and, ultimately, salvation. When this particular theology gained strength, Weber argued that it no longer required the direct support of capitalist ideology and let that fall away from its theological praxis. Considering the current nature of western fundamentalist Christianities it is hard to imagine that the immense and powerful relationship that it has with capitalist ideology, politics and wealth production could fall away. It may not. Global politics is an arena of intense change and struggle. The rise of religious fundamentalism as response to global instabilities, and the developing politics of fear about change, the encouragement of hate and rage against the ‘other’ whose difference continues to define normality, are growing. For example, in Australia over the last ten years, the Government has moved to close its borders to those who seek refuge from inhumane political regimes. Indeed, it has moved to excise its own territories – small islands in the Pacific – in order to dump refugees there in a place that is not-Australia. It has also bribed small Pacific island nations with increased aid and money to take people for processing; anything rather than allowing refugees to land in Australia. This is a monumental forgetting of the fact that only 200 years ago, the ancestors of Anglo Australians landed in Botany Bay and began a new colony for the British Empire.7 A new language – asylum seekers – emerges to signify those who refuse to ’queue‘ for proper migration processes. This language is often used by Australian migrants themselves who did queue twenty and thirty years ago, and now want that imposed on a group for which this is impossible. The refugees are treated appallingly, and the process of applications is slow. The Government trades 5 Lisa Isherwood, ‘Incarnation in Times of Terror: Christian Theology and the Challenge of September 11th’, Feminist Theology, vol. 14 no. 1 (2005): 69–82. 6 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Harper Collins, 1991 [1930]). 7 John O’Carroll, ‘Federation or Perdition: Australian Dreams of Nationhood’, in Eremos Essay Supplement No 26 (2001).

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in the politics of fear and terrorism; it sets up programmes that encourage citizens to ‘dob-in’ anyone whose behaviour appears questionable. The current borders between countries, particularly at airports, are places of stress and fear. As well as being victims of this kind of violence, women themselves are often key players in the demonization of ‘other’ peoples, and indeed of fundamentalist movements.8 Articulations of Post-Christian Feminisms Genealogies of Christian feminisms provide accounts of the ways in which women engage with the politics of injustice and liberation, and it is largely from this agenda that post-Christian feminisms emerge. Beginning with Mary Daly’s work, we argue that the call to women to leave the Church, find their own voices and articulate their own spiritual and theological analyses has been central to theological praxis. Thousands, maybe millions, of women did leave the Church and began exploring other histories and accounts of women’s religious experience. Mary Daly provided not only a sharp critique of gender and power in the Church, but also a language from which new forms of subjectivity could be imagined. The excavation of hidden histories of women, religion and culture were celebrated: from early Goddess societies pre-dating Hebrew society through the millennia to modern forms of Christianity. A new discourse – thealogy – emerged to explore the feminine as divine in all its cultural forms and to re-locate key terms such as the sacred, embodiment, ecology and nature within a new discursive framework. Much of this work (see in particular the work of Carol Christ, Naomi Goldenburg, Starhawk and Melissa Raphael) accepted that for women to find religious legitimacy required a move away from tradition and church primarily because it was understood that Christian culture was patriarchal to the core and incapable of providing a full humanity for women. From these positions women engaged with a deconstruction of the idea of God itself as well as the edifices that the traditional God gave birth to (see for example the work of Sallie McFague, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Ivone Gebara). In the early days much of the discourse was fractured and there could be very little mutual agreement between those who worked within Christianity to find the female divine and those who left Christianity looking for her in other older traditions. While there remains huge diversity there also seems to be emerging a number of areas in which similar understandings are coming to light. This we see as a strength of the ‘post’ position we are taking, that is to say that those who still work through a tradition can retain integrity while opening up greater areas of commonality for ongoing discussion. A recent articulation of post-Christian feminist theology as after Christianity comes from Daphne Hampson’s work where she argues that Christianity is morally and politically unjustifiable if we take seriously women’s liberation. In After Christianity Hampson argues that there must be an ethical apriori position in Christianity that locates women as fully human. She based this not so much on an interpretation

8 Laura Donaldson and Pui-lan Kwok (eds), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 1.

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of scripture or tradition but as a philosophical standpoint which countered that the Church’s acceptance and historical commitment to the divinity of Jesus Christ meant that women could never be accorded real equality but would be always in some form of second place. Likewise she argued that feminism as a discourse of gender equality could not politically align itself with a tradition that continued to maintain the divinity of humanity through a man. It could not stand up to the arguments and positions put forward by theism and humanism and thus she rejected Christianity as a faith position that could further or even include the liberation of women. Hence, after Christianity refers to a temporal position as much as a discursive position. Hampson has also argued that the claim for autonomy that feminism makes, that is that women should be free and true to themselves within their own skins, does not sit easy with traditional Christianity which exerts ultimate power from outside. It is here that ‘post’ of the kind that we are suggesting can be disrupting since this approach has to unsettle many of the fixed points of Christian theology such as Christology and redemption. Only by understanding these traditions in another way, thinking about them differently, will we be able to think through our own skins differently and situate our own subjectivity more radically on the planet. But it is the case that, in discursive terms, much of the reading practices utilized by feminist theologians are in fact deconstructive. They aim to expose and deconstruct male-centred theological discourse, and to re-formulate the central stories of biblical texts which provide an inclusive account of women as religious and political agents. The central discourses of theology have all been the object of feminist analyses and in this respect constitute a post-Christian reading position. The question remains how much re-reading can be done in order that we remain in a ‘post’ position, which is critically creative from within and at what point we move to an ‘after’ position; a position that we may not wish to occupy. The Collection The thoughts gathered in these articles challenge many of the accepted wisdoms of the academy and for this we are delighted. The authors place before us the gift of thinking differently and in so doing offer many avenues ahead. Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack shake the ground in the philosophy of religion by challenging the very core of how this discipline understands itself. Anderson asks in what ways ‘post’ may be separate from ‘modern’ and what are the implications of this separation. She finds the answer to be in transformation and conversion rather than in an abandonment of that we are critiquing. For her, Daphne Hampson’s assertion that one had to move on from Christianity as it was no longer ethical enough, which at one time seemed correct, needs to be reassessed. The need to reassess lies in the fact that women continue to be Christian and ethical and so what does this lived experience present us with? Anderson claims that we are faced with a series of new beginnings that demand engagement and continue to challenge. Clack challenges the assumption that philosophy is simply the art of reason. She illustrates how philosophers on all sides of various arguments all seem to agree that

Introduction

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reason lies at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. For her this is only part of the story and she begins her philosophical enterprise from elsewhere. Her point of departure is between Freud and Nietzsche, where the human being can be understood as dwelling between the animal instincts [Freud] and the ability to demonstrate Godlike reason [Nietzsche]. For Clack there is a limit to philosophy which, claiming to be about the love of wisdom, fails to engage our unconscious drives and desires and believes all can be encapsulated in the sterile and cold light of reason. Her project is more passionate and engaged with the depth of who we are as humans and she considers that any philosophy of religion has to deal with the immense range and depth of the religious impulse. For Clack this engagement sheds more light on what it is to be human and so is an urgent task for philosophers as well as theologians. In the articles on ecofeminism two authors take different but interesting approaches. Rosemary Radford Ruether takes us through a careful analysis of the work of Starhawk, Carol Christ and Ivone Gebara in order to place before us their challenges to the traditional views of the world. What emerges is a picture of matter as alive and relational and demanding respect and interconnection from humans. We are shown how the networking of relationships that is central to a feminist view of the human person also includes all aspects of the cosmos. Ruether demonstrates how these women from different traditions actually deconstruct God and in so doing reject the splitting of the divine from the earth; a position that brings them close to each other. In advocating the matrix of life-giving energy these writers are contemplating a very similar picture of the sacred. We tend to forget that such a position would have been almost impossible years ago and in itself signals the strength of the ‘post’ position. What is also demonstrated through this article is that the ‘post’ does not mean we have to move beyond in order to come to this place of emerging similarities. In her article, Anne Elvey investigates the relocation of transcendence, arguing for an eco-feminist materialist transcendence. Along with Irigaray she reminds us that women and nature have both been excluded from transcendence and situated in materiality, and she argues for a reassessment of materiality. It should no longer be viewed as purely immanence but rather as self transcendent and a place that can mediate the transcendence of the other and of the divine. In this way she argues for a rethinking of transcendence not as a `beyondness’ outside matter but rather as otherness within matter. Radical immanence is an orientation to the other in interrelationality and is the site of the formation of subjectivity. Elvey’s approach calls for more materialism and not less, but one that recognizes the possibilities for moving towards the ‘other’. The articles on hermeneutics are challenging and creative. Janet Wootton reminds us that all readings are akin to the way in which we engage with fairytales. Taking the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as her starting point she engages in a poststructuralist reading of sacred texts. We, like Goldilocks, have been prepared for a life of submission to male readings and instead have to threaten the cosy family of male reading by being ‘resisting readers’. Wootton clearly demonstrates how women are emasculated by reading male texts where we are powerless and divided, self against self. While celebrating feminist readings, Wootton also cautions that feminist readings cannot open the door wide enough for the world to pass through.

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This is the point at which she is arguing for a ‘post’ feminist reading in the sense of moving differently within the discourse, not passing beyond it. She reminds us that the bible is a politically drenched text and that our readings have to be acts of reading in community and context. In her article she demonstrates many creative and challenging ways of reading. J’an Jobling starts her examination of the ‘post’ world with a reminder that it is not a moving beyond but rather a denouncing or an exposure of the iniquitous and from here, a reclaiming and expanding. She engages in two readings – that of the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension motif and the creation story – in order to demonstrate the creative potential of ‘post’ readings. Looking again at feminist concerns about the nature of sacrifice and suffering associated with the crucifixion, she asks if there is another way to see. It may indeed be possible to see the death of Christ as the death of the male symbolic order while from the tomb rises the resurrected self of the female person who, as the abject one, has been placed there in order to transform it from a place of death to one of fecundity. Jobling also questions whether much feminist theology has been too essentialist in its concerns with the maleness of Jesus; she sees male and female as more permeable and understands the body as a terrain of becoming and thus as a fluid site of what may be. In Jobling’s argument the male Christ may be more of a problem for men. She argues that female becoming may need a masculine symbolic as a divine mirror; the male is denied this mirror of divine becoming when we image a purely male God. For Jobling the creation story has defied constant readings, and this is their strength as they retain their disruptive potential. In the articles on queer theology we are asked to look again at how we actually think and therefore how we engage with our traditions. Marcella Althaus-Reid reminds us that nobody defines us better than our enemies. In considering feminist and gay, lesbian and transgender theology, she suggests that, as challenging as they are, they do not depart from the old paradigm as they are still operating within the frame of an unfolding truth. They have not, in her opinion, dared to journey without a map, while queer theology dwells in the instability of becoming and has no certainty of arriving. Queer theology, she suggests, is concerned with the meaning of in-betweenness and this is why she engages with the notion of the bi-girl in her articles. The girl, not the woman, is passing through and so does not allow concepts and experiences to settle. Althaus-Reid claims that we can speak of God best when we do not repeat or fix God and for this purpose she encourages us to engage with changing identities, to allow the texts and traditions to queer us rather than to fix us. Lisa Isherwood looks for the queer potential in the queen of heaven and in so doing attempts to remove the phallus from our collective psyche. Using the notion of the phallic mother, which is the crux of sexual and political systems and the fetish which removes us from reality, she attempts to uncover the challenges of autonomy for women and dependency for men. In returning sexual desire to the virgin placed in a real body and with real genitals, Isherwood demonstrates the creative and challenging potential of queer theology. From within an existing theological concept, that of virgin mother, lady of perpetual succour, she destabilizes the tradition and points to new possibilities and different political realities.

Introduction

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The articles on the sacred are exciting and offer other ways of thinking. Kathleen McPhillips surveys the field of feminist interjections into social theory on the sacred. Beginning with Durkheim’s account of the sacred as completely opposite to the profane – and which dominates theoretical approaches to the sacred – she looks at the ways in which feminist theorists including Nancy Jay and Victoria Lee Erickson deconstruct this discourse. The work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray critique discourses of violence and sacrifice while showing how they underpin modern western consciousness and place the maternal at the core of the abject. Psychoanalytic accounts also problematize ‘religion’ as a discourse, and propose a different approach to questions of awe and ultimacy. Finally, McPhillips looks at feminist re-constructions of the sacred and the problems that they produce in moving the discourse onto new ground. Mary Condren looks critically at the central location of discourses of sacrifice, atonement and redemption in accounts of Christian faith and practice. Condren argues that the legitimation of sacrifice is directly tied to the exclusion and devaluation of women and suggests that the placement of mercy as the core of Christian practice is desperately needed if we are to respond to global crises. Frances Gray and Kathleen McPhillips consider the meaning of the term ‘post’ in both post-Christian and post-colonial accounts of the sacred in contemporary Australian cultural and theological analysis. They provide two readings – by Elaine Wainwright and Anne Pattel-Gray – which demonstrate a reading strategy that identifies instances of neo-colonial inscription while also suggesting alternative, feminist readings of significant texts to the feminist theological community. The two articles on Jesus demonstrate the breadth of this discourse. Satoko Yamaguchi begins from a triple ‘post’ position, that of post-Christian, post-colonial and post-feminist. Her context is Japan, where Christianity has been both oppressive and liberative. She claims that biblical scholarship is trapped in a racialized discourse from which it is hard to free itself and that this discourse relies on an idealized western reading of world history. By re-evaluating the Jesus tradition through the eyes of the Sophia Movement, Yamaguichi wishes to reformulate a Christian identity that will not downgrade the differences in spiritual traditions but will rather sustain global collaborations. This process can begin via the post-colonial feminist recognition that conflicts and limitation were part of the tradition from the beginning. In this way the pursuit of an idealized western hegemonic discourse on world history is abandoned and replaced by a much more realistic eye on where we have been and so where we may go. Yamaguchi is careful to ensure that her own advocacy of the Sophia Movement does not also fall into a romantic and idealized version of what may actually have been. Lisa Isherwood asks us to consider the possibility of a post-metaphysical Christology as an authentic way to engage fully with the as yet unexplored nature of incarnation. This is a ‘post’ that many Christians would believe to be unthinkable let alone necessary and would be a ‘post’ that many feminists would feel unwise, arguing that there is something in the nature of metaphysics that is fundamental to the psychic space needed by humans. Isherwood argues that dualistic metaphysics have not allowed the creative and transforming potential of an incarnational religion

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to explore itself since they have captured people within their own skin, a position from which they will not easily flourish. Finally, Elizabeth Stuart provides us with a challenging look at death through ‘post’ eyes. She takes as her starting point the disintegration of the meta-narratives and the singularity of the modernist illusion that there ever were universal interpretations equally shared by all. She questions the wisdom of feminist theologies and others not dealing with the matter of life after death in any robust way. What she calls the ‘compost’ life after death theology does not truly address the question of what happens after and, more importantly, what Christianity offers those whose life here has been brief, painful and unfulfilled. In short, she feels that much of the most recent theology about death has a distinctly western and privileged flavour about it. In addition, she argues that this complacent view lacks Christian imagination and this in turn has implications for how we live. She argues that in refusing to accept that baptism is an embracing of death and resurrection then we are locked into the social reality in which we live, such as gender and heterosexism, rather than queering it through living otherwise. Stuart argues that Christianity has death at the heart of its sacramental system and that the Christian life not lived as though in the presence of the death/resurrection reality is a life not fully lived. The heart of this book is to continue the work of feminist liberatory praxes in relation to theology and religion, and in particular to recognize and explore the use and status of post-theory in feminist theologies. We believe that these essays make an on-going contribution to the discourse of Christian feminist theologies and their liberation agendas.

Chapter 1

Beyond Reason: Towards a PostChristian Philosophy of Religion Beverley Clack

Introduction Philosophers have always emphasized that responsible opinions must be based on argument rather than on private preference or group conviction. Even those who hold the position that there are beliefs for which we need no argument must provide an argument for their position. Furthermore, their opponents must also formulate arguments for why they disagree. Ideally, then, one will rest one’s point of view on sound thinking and will be open to persuasion based on further careful reasoning. (M. Peterson, W. Hasker, B. Reichenbach and D. Basinger, 1991: 7) Religion is essentially emotion. (Feuerbach [1841] 1957: 25)

In offering their description of the methodology employed by philosophers of religion, the authors of one of the introductory texts to the subject present a picture of the philosopher of religion as one who seeks reasons for the beliefs that people hold. Beliefs – if they are to be taken seriously – must be based upon ‘sound thinking’ rather than ‘on private preference or group conviction’. My suggestion, to the contrary, is that considering religion with a view to establishing whether it is reasonable or not fails to engage with the multifaceted role that religiosity plays in the life of human beings. As such – and in common with other feminist philosophers of religion1 – I shall challenge the narrow focus of a philosophy of religion that eschews an engagement with emotion and desire. At the same time, I shall show that a philosophical sleight of hand occurs when philosophers claim that they approach religion and religious categories in a purely rational way. Such claims ignore the extent to which ‘reasonableness’ is invariably connected with an understanding of religion moulded in Christian terms. As someone who is interested in considering religion as a natural human phenomenon,2 I shall argue that moving philosophy of religion away from its connection with what might be called ‘Christian philosophy’ opens up new approaches to the philosophical study of religion. While accepting 1 See Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) and Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) for similar if distinct challenges to the construction of philosophy of religion as a discipline. 2 And, it should be noted, as none the worse for that!

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that it is not possible to approach the study of religion in a wholly objective way, for there is no ‘view from nowhere’, there might be ways of engaging with this phenomenon that reveals something of what it is to be human, rather than simply what it means to practise a particular faith. As such, my post-Christian philosophy of religion will also be post-Freudian, applying not just reason to the study of religion, but also allowing for the role that desire and the unconscious play in shaping human responses to the world and to each other. Christianity and the Philosophy of Religion In the summer of 2003, the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion met in Oxford. For the first time, its proceedings were conducted jointly with the American based Society of Christian Philosophers. This explicit connection between philosophy of religion, as it is practised in the English-speaking world, and the Christian religion suggests that the subject’s apparent commitment to an ‘objective’ engagement with the phenomenon of religion, expressed in the description of the subject given by Peterson et al, is not all that it seems. Indeed, to consider the subject’s evolution is to get some sense of the way in which supposedly secular western societies remain dependent upon Christian attitudes and values. Consider, for example, the way in which philosophy of religion – at least in its English-speaking context – has been primarily concerned with the application of reason to religious belief. It is, in this sense, an inheritor of the European Enlightenment of the ‘long’ seventeenth century. However, the concern to present a form of apologetic that convinces unbelievers of the veracity of a religious position can be traced to the ‘natural theology’ of pre-Reformation Catholic scholasticism. Indeed the ideas of Anselm and Aquinas remain central in shaping courses in the philosophy of religion, and their ideas, while often distilled from their specific theological context, are fundamentally grounded in the exposition and explication of the Catholic faith. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is a staple component of undergraduate courses.3 According to Anselm, accepting the definition of God as ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’ means that one cannot then say that this God does not exist. This is often presented as a purely logical argument for God’s existence. Yet placing it as he does within the context of a prayerful meditation to the God in whom he already believes raises the question of what, precisely, Anselm is doing when he reflects upon the nature of God. Clearly he has a prior commitment to this divine being, and is not seeking to convince himself of that God’s reality by formulating a logical argument. Reflection on Anselm’s writing suggests a complex engagement with religion that involves not just abstract philosophical argument. Anselm’s writing is personal as well as academic, shaping his whole outlook on life. Reasoning about his faith is one aspect of his engagement with God, but only one aspect. His head and his heart are intimately connected in the discussion of the divine. This may seem strange to professional philosophers of religion who even when explicitly discussing the 3 See Anselm’s Proslogion, chapters 2–4.

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emotions do so only in the context of exploring what would constitute ‘rightly ordered emotions’ (Swinburne 1998: 79), thus prioritizing mind over desire. But taking seriously the manner of Anselm’s writing suggests a more integrated account of human personhood than one that locates all value in the working of the rational mind: and by implication a more complex connection between Christian commitment and philosophical reasoning. So why has reason become the only lens through which philosophers analyse the meaning and significance of religion and religious belief? Historical, intellectual, and social movements have shaped the philosophy of religion as, indeed, they have shaped other disciplines. The shift from Catholic to Protestant sensibilities in Britain is highly significant for understanding the kind of Christian belief that underpins the discipline. With the Reformation, the role of reason became more significant for understanding and framing human life. ‘Faith seeking understanding’ was not simply the business of an elite group, but a fundamental component of the Protestant view of what faith involved. Keith Thomas, famously, illustrated the connections between magic and religion in folk Catholicism, showing how this connection is resisted by early Protestantism, and replaced by an emphasis on right belief rather than right practice (Thomas 1973: 767–800). More recently, Tina Beattie has built upon and developed this connection, arguing that philosophy of religion operates with a set of assumptions about what religion and Christianity involves, and that these assumptions reflect all too clearly the scientific paradigm that underpins Protestantism. To re-engage with Catholicism – in her case, interpreted through the lens of French literary criticism – will lead to a more imaginative view of what actually constitutes religion (Beattie 2004). The Enlightenment – at least ostensibly – seems to move beyond these shifts in Christian practice, offering a rather more neutral basis for the discussion of religion. Yet in practice, many of its practitioners approach religion in ways that mirror Protestant concerns. And this means that what is excluded from the discussion of religion is often what is excluded from Protestant accounts of what constitutes ‘genuine’ religion. So relics, saints, holy days and pilgrimage are often ignored when describing what ‘good’ religion, what ‘reasonable’ religion, will look like. Kant’s writings provide a good example of the implicit (Protestant?) assumptions that underpin such understandings of ‘good’ religion. When considering the difference between the black and white races he notes the features of African religion that differentiate it from white religion: ‘The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths’ (Kant [1763] 1991: 111). While contemporary philosophers of religion would avoid grounding such claims in the racist assumptions that inform Kant’s words, the implicit idea that there is a ‘true’ form of religion continues to haunt the discipline. The attempt to establish the existence of God supports this conclusion. For analytic philosophy of religion, belief in God constitutes the basic category of religious belief: and ‘God’ is subsequently defined in terms common to all the monotheistic faiths. ‘God’ is viewed as a being whose existence can be proved by rational argument, a God who is omnipotent,

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omniscient, immutable, impassible, eternal and perfectly good. In determining whether religion is meaningful or not, the philosopher of religion seems committed to an enterprise which considers whether there are good grounds for belief in such a God. Is it possible, for example, to provide arguments that support – or reject – the existence of such a God? And in practice there seems little difference between the way in which the subject matter of religion is understood: so Swinburne and Mackie’s famous dispute over the existence of God is dependent upon a common understanding of what belief in God involves, the difference lying in their conclusions about whether belief in that God is based upon solid ground.4 This implicit framework fails to engage with the variety of religious expression and thus misses what religion in all its manifest forms might tell us about the strange animal ‘man’. Even philosophers of religion who have attempted to develop rather different methodologies to those considered thus far continue to operate with a framework that makes a distinction between what might be called ‘true’ religion and ‘superstition’. D.Z. Phillips, the foremost exponent of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, adopts precisely this true/false dichotomy. Phillips’ work has challenged the idea that religion can be ‘explained’ or ‘justified’ in the way that analytic philosophers of religion suggest (see, for example, Phillips 1976). For Phillips, the focus is on ‘the insider’, an approach which has the advantage of moving us away from the idea of the philosopher of religion as a transcendent observer, removed from the rituals, beliefs and practices that ‘he’ is observing and upon which ‘he’ is commenting. Instead, the philosopher is asked to focus on what the believer thinks they are doing. In actuality this approach is not as believer-centred as it claims to be: there is a tendency to force the believer’s claims into a model that coheres with ideas of what constitutes ‘reasonable’ belief. So Phillips contrasts what he sees as ‘superstitious’ forms of prayer which seek to ‘change God’s mind’ with prayers that are not seeking an answer from God, but are, rather, striving to accept ‘the will of God’: I heard a diver tell of an experience which occurred while he was searching a wreck. He lost his torch and could not find the exit of the hold. He prayed: ‘O God get me out of this. I’ll do anything you want if only you’ll let me find my way out.’ Compare that prayer with: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.’ (Psalm 23).

Phillips’ attempt to engage with the actual nature of religious practice, grounded in a given faith community, is open to criticism precisely because of this tendency to differentiate between genuine religion and superstition. What matters less is describing what the believer does (strange in itself, given his claims to follow Wittgenstein), and more making a decision about what precisely the believer thinks they are doing and whether this is reasonable or not. This leads, as Terrence Tilley 4 Compare the arguments presented by Richard Swinburne in The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) and those presented by John Mackie in The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). For example, Mackie states at the outset that ‘I shall follow Swinburne in taking these descriptions [of God] fairly literally, though in some I shall allow reasonable qualifications and flexibilities in interpretation’ (p. 1).

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has pointed out in his excellent discussion of Phillips’ work, to a limited account of what religion involves. As Tilley puts it: ‘By practically denigrating the religious practices he labels “superstitious” his philosophy of religion reflects only a part of religion’ (Tilley 2000: 346, my emphasis). In this, Phillips, like other philosophers of religion, constructs an account of religion that ignores the non-rational, emotive and, frankly, sometimes weird aspects of religious belief and practice. As Tilley puts it: ‘“religious belief” and “superstition” are rarely, if ever, unmixed’ (Tilley 2000: 350). It would, of course, be a mistake to suggest that there are no philosophers of religion who are seeking to consider religion in different ways. Recent work in the discipline has seen a concerted attempt to move beyond the account of reason given by Enlightenment thinkers. Mention has already been made of the attempt by feminists to challenge the over-emphasis on reason. In so doing, the dualistic structure that supports the traditional approach to the discipline has been challenged, and desire has been seen as a vital part of the experience of being human. For some feminists – most notably Grace Jantzen, Amy Hollywood and Ellen Armour5 – this means taking seriously the emphasis placed on difference in continental philosophy, a theme developed in Philip Goodchild’s recent collection of essays.6 Goodchild et al attempt to take seriously the difference that marks human experience in terms of race, gender, and class, suggesting that diverse and varied accounts of religion will emerge from such an engagement. In similar vein, philosophers of religion who stand in the analytic tradition, such as Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, have highlighted the philosophical questions that arise within specific religious traditions, thus avoiding the idea that there could be a generalized philosophical account of what religion involves.7 An engagement with what religion involves in terms of concrete practice is clearly important, but having said that there is something about the engagement with a more generalized account of religion that I would like to maintain and explore in the remainder of this article. Engaging with the religious impulse in general may tell us much about what it is to be a human animal. Religion and the ‘Sick Animal’: Shaping a Post-Christian Philosophy of Religion So far, we have considered the way in which philosophy of religion developed over time into the kind of discipline that now forms an important part of many degrees 5 See Jantzen, Becoming Divine, Ch. 3; Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Ellen Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology and the Problem of Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 6 Philip Goodchild (ed.), Difference in Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 7 See Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) where Part I of their collection explicitly links philosophical issues to specific religious traditions; also Susan Frank Parsons (ed.), Challenging Women’s Orthodoxies in the Context of Faith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), which locates feminist critical engagement with religion in the context of the specific faith practices of women.

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in theology and religious studies. Now I want to turn our attention to the concept of human being that supports philosophies of religion that, at least ostensibly, seem to have very different agendas. For the philosophies of religion we have mentioned thus far, prioritizing the ability to reason unites even the most vociferous of opponents. Richard Swinburne and D.Z. Phillips are often to be found on opposing sides of various debates in the philosophy of religion,8 yet both adopt surprisingly similar accounts of what it is to be human. Swinburne’s attempt to find justifications for religious belief is predicated upon the idea that reason is what differentiates us from the animals; Phillips’ method of focusing on those aspects of religious belief that make sense, excluding those aspects that go against reason and which are in this sense ‘superstitious’, suggests a similar assumption. In these accounts of what it is to be human one gets a sense of the extent to which the Enlightenment conception of human being is dependent upon Christian thought forms. Common to both Catholic and Protestant theology is the idea that human beings are made in the imago Dei, located, according to Augustine,9 in the mind.10 It is reason and thought that distinguishes us from the animals. Such a view of human being inevitably leads to the attempt to establish the reasonableness of religious belief, a stance that at best will marginalize other aspects of human life, and at worst will avoid engaging with the way in which these aspects and responses challenge this paradigm of what it is to be human. My post-Christian philosophy of religion begins with a rather different view of what it is to be human: a view derived from the ideas of two of the ‘masters of suspicion’, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.11 For Nietzsche and Freud human beings cannot be described simply in terms of the ability to reason, yet neither can they be described simply as animals. Indeed, the peculiarities of the human condition arise precisely because we are caught between our animal instincts and the apparently god-like capacity to reason. This leads Nietzsche to describe man as ‘the sick animal’ (Nietzsche [1887] 1956: 257); the one creature whose way of living is at odds with its animal nature. Freud sees human beings in a remarkably similar way.12 Our peculiarity lies in the fact that we are torn between our animal instincts and the 8 See for example their respective papers on evil in Stuart Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 81–139. 9 Whose ideas, it should be noted, support the central doctrines of both forms of Christianity. 10 On the Trinity Book XII. 11 It is interesting to note that Nietzsche and Freud, despite their notorious views on woman (see Beverley Clack (ed.), Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition: A Reader (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 192–205), have proved useful for developing the ideas of some feminists: Mary Daly’s work, while rightly critical of Nietzsche’s misogyny, employs elements of his critique of Christianity (see Mary Daly, Pure Lust (London: Women’s Press, 1984), pp. 100–101), while Juliet Mitchell (Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Pelican, 1974)) bases her account of the psychology of women within Freud’s discussion of female sexuality. 12 And we might note that Freud himself says that he deliberately did not read Nietzsche before he started formulating his own ideas on the nature of human being as he feared that there would be too much overlap with his own ideas.

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requirements of human civilization. This means that we are fundamentally unhappy creatures precisely because we find it impossible to reconcile these two opposing aspects of our existence.13 What might adopting such a paradigm mean for shaping the scope of a philosophy of religion? Sceptical voices in the history of the philosophy of religion concerned with developing ‘natural histories of religion’ sometimes use language that suggests a similar idea of human being: or at least the religious human being. David Hume, for example, refers to religion as ‘sick men’s dreams’ (Hume [1757] 1993: 184). Feuerbach reiterates this image in his highly influential Essence of Christianity by describing religion as ‘the dream of the human mind’ (Feuerbach [1841] 1957: xxxix). For Hume and Feuerbach, this image of the dream is utilized to describe their belief that religion is concerned with illusions – and for Hume unhealthy illusions at that. My intention is to use this image in the more comprehensive way in which Nietzsche and Freud use it. For Nietzsche and Freud we are all sick animals, all caught in the double bind of our humanity. As such, ‘illusions’ are what will shape pretty much all human activity as we seek to make sense of our place in this world. And as AnaMaria Rizzuto has noted, ‘men cannot be men without illusions’ (Rizzuto 1979: 209; cited in Palmer 1997: 75): a claim that suggests that we would be mistaken in thinking that human beings can be understood without considering the range of their dreams and fantasies. It is in this way that I intend to employ this model: in other words, less as a factual, ‘scientific’ description of what it is to be human, and more as a creative image that will enable an engagement with the full range of experiences open to human beings. Accepting that we are animals, but animals who are not fully comfortable with their animality, provides an important way of engaging with religion. Religion, according to Feuerbach, is the thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, for ‘the brutes have no religion’ (Feuerbach 1957: 1). If such a view is accepted, our engagement with religion should be more profound than simply trying to work out if religious beliefs are coherent or not: exploring human religiosity offers a vital way into the dreams, ideals and fantasies that shape our sense of ourselves. Thus my post-Christian philosophy of religion also accepts Feuerbach’s famous contention that ‘religion is human life reflected, mirrored in itself’ (Feuerbach 1957: 63). My challenge, then, to the role that reason has played in determining the shape of philosophy of religion is not about proclaiming that there can be no reasoned engagement with reality, but rather with attempting to widen the vision of what religion involves. The fact that we are, to put it bluntly, strange animals gets lost if too much credence is placed upon discovering the extent to which our beliefs conform to rational criteria. We are not simply rational beings: we act out of other concerns and feelings too. Tilley expresses this well when he reflects that the problem with Phillips’ philosophy of religion is that it suggests that: ‘a religious practice motivated by fear and involving causality is not really religious’ (Tilley 2000: 348). It may well be that practices of which ‘we’ (who broadly accept the scientific paradigm of

13 See Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930) where this theme is developed in detail.

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the world) do not approve can tell us much about the particular and peculiar way in which the human being expresses and develops itself. To accept such a view necessitates engaging with an area that interests both Freud and Nietzsche: namely, the unconscious drives and desires that shape human life. For Freud, ‘the dream work’ is important because our dreams are in part the enciphered forms of our repressed desires.14 Through analysis of those dreams it is possible to arrive at a sense of the things that concern and perhaps torment us. Note that under this model we are not straightforwardly conscious beings: we are, if you like, mysterious even to ourselves. And despite Freud’s attempt to promote analysis as a way of shoring up the structures of the fragile ego, his work leaves us with a sense that it is the unconscious drives and desires that dominate human life and practice. For Nietzsche, human life and culture is framed by the tension between the Apollonian, culture-creating self and the Dionysian celebration of nature and the instincts. His solution to this tension is rather different from Freud’s: despite the exhortation at the end of The Birth of Tragedy that we should ‘sacrifice in the temple of both gods’ ([1870–71] 1957: 146), it is ultimately by embracing Dionysus, by saying yes to life, that it is possible to live ‘beyond good and evil’.15 Indeed, the failure to engage with Dionysus, the natural world of the passions and instincts, leads to the death of Apollonian culture. As Nietzsche puts it in his usual, highly provocative language: ‘because you had deserted Dionysus, you were in turn deserted by Apollo’ (1957: 69). The artificiality of reason and the world that it can create cannot survive if it fails to be grounded in an awareness of the potentiality of other forces – violence, sex, and death – to shape human experience. Reading Nietzsche and Freud gives a sense of the tension between the different experiences of being human, and also the difficulties of holding these poles in balance. It may well be impossible to balance these different views of what it is to be human – neither Freud nor Nietzsche seems able, ultimately, to do this. But even if this idea of balance is impossible to maintain, it is worth attempting. Pursuing that tension rather than focusing on only one aspect of our humanity leads me to seek a re-reading of figures who inform the shape of philosophical discussions of religion but who are considered in ways that over-simplify or distort their ideas. The ideas of significant figures in the development of western religious sensibilities are invariably read through a rationalist glass where strange comments or inconsistencies are ironed out or omitted. Aspects of their thought that cohere with the assumption that religious belief, to be taken seriously, must be reasonable become the aspects that are emphasized. Augustine provides a fine example of what happens to a thinker when this methodology is employed. Augustine’s work is invariably presented purely in terms of those aspects that offer a rational basis for religious belief. His ideas on how to reconcile evil with the goodness of God (City of God XII-XIV) or his systematic discussion of how time relates to God (Confessions XI) are considered at length. Those aspects of his 14 This claim is most fully expressed in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900). 15 Camille Paglia uses Nietzsche’s model of the tension between Apollo and Dionysus in her Sexual Personae (London: Penguin, 1991): ‘Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature’ (p. 39).

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thought that seem to suggest ‘baser’ worries and more troubling understandings of what religion might involve are ignored. Time and again, for example, Augustine returns to the troubling case of the penile erection that denies the control of the will (Confessions X, 30; On Marriage and Concupiscence I, 7; City of God, XIV, 16, 20, 23). Not only does male ejaculation affect the loss of the mind that is, remember, the location of the image of God (City of God, XIV, 16): the very ability of the penis to spontaneously erect suggests that the body might well be stronger than the mind. To adapt Hume’s famous comment, penile erection suggests that reason really might be the slave of the passions! We might argue that dismissing such reflections is valid: after all, his discussion of theological matters is of wider importance than his rather idiosyncratic musings on the trials of having a male body. Such editorial bias (which seems to shape the way in which Augustine’s ideas are integrated into many university courses) means that we fail to consider his ideas in an appropriately rounded way. Indeed, the assumption seems to be that logical argument and reasoned debate is more significant for understanding Augustine than the more ‘irrational’ concerns that he appears to have. Feminist theologians have consistently shown the limitations of a theology that avoids taking seriously the sexual realm:16 without an understanding of the way in which Augustine’s sexuality shapes his theology and spirituality, it is impossible to get to grips with the complexity of his ideas. Reason and desire inform his writing. For Augustine, spontaneous erection is not just inconvenient, it threatens the very idea that ‘I’ might be made in the image of God and thus ensures that he develop an account of evil that explains this troublesome feature. To neglect this aspect of his thought is to seriously misrepresent the issues that shape his theology. This leads me to some tentative conclusions about how a philosophy of religion might proceed. If it is to offer any insight into the phenomenon of religion, it must offer a wider analysis of the sources of religious belief than can be undertaken if it simply continues in its attempt to provide justifications – or rejections – of belief based on reason alone. In developing such a philosophy of religion, revisiting Freud can be particularly helpful. At this point I need to say something about my reading of Freud, given that it is possible to read Freud in two very different ways. Most commonly, there is the reading of Freud as a rationalist, committed to eradicating the superstitious and fallacious connections that religion makes between thought and the external world. When philosophers of religion have engaged with Freud’s ideas it is this Freud that tends to take centre stage (see Mackie 1982: 196; Clarke and Byrne 1993: 173–87). And for some this can lead to the easy dismissal of his ideas: his theories are overly dependent on the analysis of neurotic patients; his theories are reductionist; his natural history of religion is dependent upon a primal history for which there is no evidence, and so on.17 16 See for example the work of Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart (Introducing Body Theology, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998)) in developing ‘body theologies’ that take seriously sexuality as a fundamental part of spirituality. 17 See Peter Clarke and Peter Byrne, Religion Defined and Explained (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 200–202 for a synopsis of such criticisms.

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But there is a second Freud: the Freud James DiCenso refers to as ‘the other Freud’ (DiCenso 1999). This is the Freud who undermines the claim that reason is the foremost power in the processes that determine human being, postulating instead the powerful workings of the unconscious. It is this Freud that I find useful for developing a philosophy of religion that moves beyond reason, and which is thus capable of understanding religion in a rather different and more convincing way. At the heart of this reading lies Freud’s ideas on psychopathology, and I hope to show that, contrary to his own intentions, it is these ideas that actually ground religious belief and action more firmly at the heart of what it is to be human. As is often the case, the two Freuds are to be found side by side. In Totem and Taboo Freud attempts to ground his theory of religion in an (allegedly) historical act of patricide that acts as a form of group memory. Adopting Darwin’s claim that the ‘primal horde’ was the first structure for human society, Freud argues that in this original family grouping, the father was the only male entitled to sex with the women. Frustrated, his sons murder him in order to have access to the women. Having killed him, however, they are overcome with guilt and instigate a yearly celebration of a meal where the totem animal that stood as a symbol for the group is killed in commemoration of the original murder of the father. All religion, Freud claims, is based upon the repressed guilt and remorse felt throughout the generations for this primal act. Indeed, the concept of God is seen to develop from the inability of any of the original brothers to take on the role of the father, and thus they long for his return: this he does in the idealized form of God.18 Setting such an account in pre-history is difficult, indeed impossible, to establish. Yet interpreting Freud’s story in mythopoetic terms may be more valuable: and it is in precisely this kind of literary way that later continental thinkers have engaged with Freud. What, for example, does this idea of patricide suggest on a psychic level? For Jacques Lacan, the murder of the father – the voice of authority – is necessary in order to open up the possibility of pleasure. Yet the father does not stay dead, but rather returns with the prohibitions against pleasure more strongly in place than before (see Lacan, ‘The Death of God’ in Ward 1997: 42). Julia Kristeva offers a similar rendition that focuses on this story as a way of engaging with the psychodrama of childhood. The father is the one who breaks the symbiotic union of mother and child. This is necessary for language to develop and with it the possibility of individuation. Yet the father’s role is ambiguous: we lose the mother, ‘la Chose’ (‘the Thing’), with whom we long to be reunited, even as we gain the tools to become individuals. Under this reading, the ambiguity of the Father-God is expressed through this story of a primal patricide. Religion, understood thus, provides an important set of stories for illuminating the desires and losses that form the basis for adulthood (see Kristeva in Ward 1997: 223–32; also Kristeva 1989). An alternative reading can also be offered for Freud’s account of the connection between religious ritual and neurotic illness. In ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907) Freud outlines the similarities between the obsessive actions through which the neurotic seeks to render safe their frightening world and religious rituals. 18 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), section IV, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13, pp. 203–5.

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Neurotic ceremonials ‘consist in making small adjustments to particular everyday actions, small additions or restrictions or arrangements, which have always to be carried out in the same, or in a methodically varied, manner’ (Freud [1907] 1985: 32). These actions might appear meaningless: but for the patient this is far from the case, for ‘any deviation from the ceremonial is visited with intolerable anxiety’ (Freud [1907] 1985: 32). The ceremonial is ‘a “sacred act”’ (Freud [1907] 1985: 32): similar to, although not exactly like, a religious ritual, most notably because these actions do not have the public and communal quality of religious practice, but are rather forms of ‘private religion’ (Freud [1907] 1985: 33). Freud’s work is dedicated to showing how such actions are related to specific repressed events in the patient’s life. These actions are thus highly meaningful, providing ways of coping – however inappropriately – with unresolved issues and repressed instincts. Of course, Freud’s intention in exposing the sources of such actions is to cure the patient: once the origin of the obsessive act is revealed the patient will be able to let go of the action. And the same goes for the illusion that is religion, for religion is ‘a universal obsessional neurosis’ (Freud [1907] 1985: 40). Yet this very description of religion as ‘a universal obsessional neurosis’ presumably suggests much about how humans generally attempt, in much the same way as neurotics, to come to an accommodation with the world that threatens to consume and destroy them. Indeed, Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) is committed to showing how we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, neurotic animals: we are all in some sense mysterious to ourselves, and it is through monitoring slips of the tongue, the things that we lose and forget, that we can come to some sense of who that mysterious person is. All of which suggests it is going to be difficult to talk of the human person as in any straightforward way defined by their conscious and rational lives. Freud seems to struggle with accepting the implications of his own theory on the unconscious, and this is perhaps best seen in his attempt to make a distinction between the superstitious person and the scientific rationalist. This distinction lies in the attitude taken towards chance. For Freud, there are chance events in terms of the things that happen in the external world; but there are no ‘internal (psychical) accidental events’ (Freud [1901] 1991: 320). The superstitious/religious person reverses this position: for this person, there are no accidental events in the external world for all is open to manipulation by the self or, in the case of the religious, by God. Freud sums this difference up in the following way: the superstitious person seeks to ‘project outwards a motivation which I look for within’ (Freud [1901] 1991: 320). But what I find interesting here is that he accepts that there is common ground. Both are attempting to make sense of the world: as Freud puts it, ‘the compulsion not to let chance count as chance but to interpret it is common to us both’ (Freud [1901] 1991: 320; my emphasis). For me, the interest lies less in making a distinction between two types of attitude, and more in the common ground that lies between the two positions. To make such a connection is even more pressing when one considers Freud’s reflections on his own behaviour. Despite this critical voice, he accepts that he is not immune from seeking such connections between his internal and external worlds:

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Post-Christian Feminisms One morning…when I was passing through a room in my dressing-gown with straw slippers on my feet, I yielded to a sudden impulse and hurled one of my slippers from my foot at the wall, causing a beautiful little marble Venus to fall down from its bracket. As it broke into pieces, I quoted quite unmoved these lines from Busch: ‘Oh! The Venus! Lost is she!…’ This wild conduct and my calm acceptance of the damage are to be explained in terms of the situation at the time. One of my family was gravely ill, and secretly I had already given up hope of her recovery. That morning I had learned that there had been a great improvement, and I know I had said to myself: ‘So she is going to live after all!’ My attack of destructive fury served therefore to express a feeling of gratitude to fate and allowed me to perform a ‘sacrificial act’ – rather as if I had made a vow to sacrifice something or other as a thank-offering if she recovered her health! (Freud [1901] 1991: 222–3)

Something very powerful is being expressed here: even the most committed rationalist is not able to evade seeking to make an intimate connection between his internal hopes and the external world that surrounds him. In this sense the attempt to divide superstition or religion from other forms of behaviour is not particularly helpful. We could – with Phillips – consider Freud’s action as merely superstitious: the position that Freud encourages us to take by dealing with this story in a light-hearted manner. But we could think about this action rather differently. We could think of it as an action that reveals something of the precarious nature of things, of how we all long for a connection with the world, for a sense that the unfeeling vastness that is the universe might care about us after all; and also how we might attempt to bring about a reconciliation with the powerful forces that threaten to crush us. Edward Hopper’s paintings express powerfully the sense that we are ultimately alone in a world that threatens to destroy us. In Nighthawks (1942), probably his most famous painting, three people sit at a bar, each isolated from the other, each seeming to be absorbed in themselves and their own concerns. There seems to be no way in, and no way out into the dark, ill-defined world that forms the exterior to the bar. In Compartment C, Car 293, a woman sits alone reading under the remorseless glare of the carriage lights. Outside, the landscape is lit by a preternatural red sunset that extends above the forbidding darkness of a wood. In such a universe where we often experience isolation and alienation, we long for connection. The religious attempt to connect with the universe is simply one of the ways in which we attempt to do this, and it is by engaging with the different forms that this desire for connection takes – not just with those aspects that are rationally justifiable – that we open up the whole question of what it is to be this strange human animal. A philosophy of religion that is to do this effectively cannot content itself with simply providing rational justifications for religious belief, or with engaging only with a preconceived notion of what ‘true’ religion involves. To be human is to be more than rational: it is to be passionate and emotional too. And in this sense it may be that ‘superstition’ tells us more about the things that drive human beings than the clear, head-based and rational religious systems that have been superimposed on the tumultuous depths that constitute our humanity.

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Conclusion A critic may argue that in my attempt to produce a ‘post’ philosophy of religion, what I have presented is not a philosophy of religion at all – after all, I have spent much time arguing against the dominant model of the discipline as the rational discussion of religious belief. In my defence, I do not intend the overthrow of reason itself: after all, the ability to reflect is a fundamental and vital part of our humanity. With Socrates, I wish to affirm that the unexamined life is not worth living.19 My concern, however, is that over-emphasizing reason in our method and our understanding of religion means that we never adequately get to grips with the phenomena of religion. And that failure to understand the religious impulse limits our understanding of what it is to be human more generally. The weirdness of allegedly ‘bad’ religion tells us much about human beings and the connections that we all attempt to make with our world, albeit in different ways. Neglecting the place of the instincts and the emotions is to develop a one-sided vision of humanity. And this has ramifications. Greek drama provides profound examples of what happens to those who neglect to engage with the totality of what it is to be this human animal, and describes with relish the horrible fates that await those who over-emphasize reason. Hippolytus, the eponymous hero of Euripides’ play, is destroyed for preferring the cool-headed virgin hunter-goddess Artemis to the rapacious goddess of sexual desire, Aphrodite. Likewise, Pentheus in The Bacchae dies at the hands of the Maenads because he has ridiculed and restricted the rites of Dionysus’ followers. His attempt to instigate a form of secular government that ignores the gods in favour of human reason is also seen as leading to his downfall: the image of his mother playing with his decapitated head in her lap whilst in the midst of a Dionysiac frenzy seems peculiarly apt given this attempt to displace the passions with the mind. In these examples Euripides seems to tell us that we ignore the emotions, the desires and the passions at our peril, for they have the power to destroy us. Such examples provide vivid examples of what happens when the world of desire, the instincts and the unconscious are ignored. Religion is not only based upon reason: its sources are to be found in the desires that drive people, the attempt to make sense of the world, and to find an accommodation with the things that threaten and disturb us. The philosopher (the lover of wisdom) should be concerned with exploring all these expressions of religiosity, not just those that conform more readily to the dictates of reason. In this way, ‘post’ philosophy of religion can provide an inroad into the wider study of what it is to be a human being: but only if it seeks to move beyond the thought forms and attitudes that it has inherited from certain forms of Christianity and their philosophical expression in some of the ideas and assumptions of the European Enlightenment.

19 We should perhaps note that writers like Martha Nussbaum have argued convincingly for a vision of Hellenistic philosophy as a form of therapy, where reason itself is defined through the engagement with the passions (see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)).

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Chapter 2

The ‘Post-’ Age of Belief: Wither or Whither Christianity? Pamela Sue Anderson

The ‘post-’ indicates something like a conversion: a new direction from the previous one. Jean-Francois Lyotard

Introduction: The Longer ‘Post-’ Persists the Greater Its Significance Becomes ‘Post-’ has become a common prefix for descriptions of various contemporary academic and cultural perspectives. Twenty years ago the ‘post-’ before ‘modern’ might have been thought to herald the end of an era. However, today this association with an ending is not so easily assumed. The longer the use of the prefix persists the less it suggests an end. Instead of finding ourselves facing the so-called post-modern ‘death’ of a piece of history we find ourselves in a post-age which supports ‘the nascent state [of Christianity], and this is constant’.1 More positively stated, we live in a formative state of constantly new beginnings. Publication of my first feminist article on the state of Christian theology, ‘After Theology: End or Transformation’, appeared fifteen years ago.2 This was written in response to the self-confessed ‘post-Christian’ Daphne Hampson who, in her Theology and Feminism, had argued that feminism was simply incompatible with Christianity.3 According to Hampson, there was no way women could be both feminist and Christian without contradiction. And so, for her, Christianity was at its end as a religion whose doctrines could no longer be understood, accepted and held to be true.4 Christian belief had been given the sense of an ending by Hampson who 1 Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Note on the Meaning of the Word “Post” and Answering the Question “What is Postmodernism?”’, in Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen (eds), Continental Aesthetics – Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 369. 2 Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘After Theology: End or Transformation?’, Journal of Literature and Theology, 7: 1 (March 1993): 78–86. 3 Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 1–3. 4 Daphne Hampson and Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Is there a place for feminists in the Christian Church?’, New Blackfriars, 68: 10–14; cf. Daphne Hampson (ed.), Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: SPCK, 1996), p. 117.

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hoped that once freed from patriarchal religion women would perceive God in ways utterly different from before. At that time I engaged Hampson’s claim that Christianity is hopelessly unethical in its treatment of women. Her argument was that God’s unethical action in history is both central and undeniable in sending a male saviour, Jesus Christ, to save… men. Not only does Hampson reject Christianity for ‘the scandal of particularity’ in God choosing to send a particular man to bring about the salvation of the rest of creation, but points out that ‘the Christian play’ has a long line of patriarchal actors whose very presence in the Old and New Testaments counts against the possibility of gender equality in Christianity. Thus Hampson quite simply and, in these strict terms, logically asserts that women must give up Christianity for their own good. Nothing could change the unequal treatment of women in the past two thousand years of Christian history, except putting an end once and for all to Christian belief and practice. From a stronger, retrospective position today I would like to maintain that Hampson’s strict sense of an ending was simply wrong. Women, including various feminists, continue to hold Christian beliefs without succumbing to an unbearably oppressive condition of immorality and untruth. Admittedly, there has been a definite change in the past decade, bringing about a ‘post-Christian’ perspective, but this label is meant here in a very precise sense. That is, an on-going transformation has begun whereby women and men are re-shaping and re-positioning Christianity, converting it from the exclusive position and patriarchal shape of previous formulations. In this sense, women and men find themselves in a constant, nascent state of belief, whether Christian or post-Christian, about God and their religious practices. Thus the post- as a prefix to Christianity is more aptly said to stand for the transformation of belief, not Christianity’s disappearance as a living religion. The question which I asked in 1993, ‘After Theology: End or Transformation?’ would have to be answered today with ‘transformation!’ Currently the global nature of the world gives evidence supporting the view that Christianity is not in any sense dead. Instead it continues to be given new beginnings by the sheer number of locations on earth where Christian belief thrives and strengthens its believers or practitioners. In the feminist locations of the world, Christianity is no longer strictly patriarchal. In many other locations, it is no longer the exclusive reserve of white European men whose beliefs have been oppressive in justifying the unethical treatment of women and of any man or creature who lacks ‘their’ (ironically) assumed maleneutral perspective on Christian belief and history.5 However, I should immediately qualify this last claim. Although ‘post-Christian’ rightly suggests that something has changed and that we follow ‘after’ these changes, this must be understood as a significant and ongoing transformative process within Christianity itself. In particular, we follow after a time when Christianity was (thought by the ‘educated’ western world to be) the one privileged religion in the 5 On the significance of ‘male-neutral’ as a description of experience which is in fact not neutral, since coloured by the particular perspective of a certain sort of man, Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 13 and 60n3.

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world. This is after a time when Christianity was strictly and exclusively patriarchal and strictly incompatible with the equality and integrity of women and their bodies. In other words, after a time when religious beliefs were fixed and beyond scrutiny, Christianity has been and continues to be transformed by global challenges. We cannot go back, for instance, to those years when the western world was unaware of its own vulnerability on matters of religious and global power. And this has both positive and negative implications. Negatively, widespread terrorism, anti-western and antiChristian arguments are no longer unusual. Positively, post-Christian describes a changed world in which Christians are no longer allowed the unequivocal privilege on truth, or to remain blind to the nature of their own beliefs, especially those beliefs which have justified their privileged, material and social positions. They are also forced to recognize the evil which has resulted from this exclusiveness both locally and globally. Of course, we should ask how much has actually changed for Christian, postChristian and non-Christian women of different classes, races, ethnic and sexual orientations at this time. There is no easy way to answer this question. But I will focus on the sense in which feminist philosophers of religion today are post-Christian. Philosophy of Religion: Post-Justification of Belief My own authority on the topic of post-Christian belief is limited to a dimension of the current state of debates about belief at the interface of feminism and Christianity in the field of philosophy of religion. So I will try to focus on the terms of belief in the field as I see them. In 1998, I defined belief loosely as ‘thoughts taken up – whether in being handed down or, in some sense, being discovered – and held as true’.6 At that time, I was eager to scrutinize the construction of belief (especially the dominant beliefs of Christian theism) in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion. However, other feminist scholars in theology and religious studies argued that the very topic of belief was a western, largely Christian preoccupation.7 Non-Christian religions in the world, or so it has been claimed, were concerned with ritual practices and bodily actions, not belief. I did and continue to find this claim odd since discussions of belief, at least as I’ve defined the term, are not incompatible 6 Ibid., p. 3. 7 References to a range of these feminist scholars include Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 18–22, 79–80 and 139–40; Ellen Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology and the Problem of Difference; Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstacy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 206–11; Amy Hollywood, ‘Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Ritual and Bodily Practice’, in Philip Goodchild (ed.), Difference in Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 73–83; Mary L. Keller, ‘Divine Women and the Nehanda Mhondoro: Strengths and Limitations of the Sensible Transcendental in a Post-Colonial World of Religious Women’, in Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith Poxon (eds), Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 68–82.

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with either rituals or bodily actions. In fact, just the opposite is the case! Arguably, rituals as disciplinary practices cannot be separated from, or made sense of, without beliefs.8 However, I am willing to concede that the question whether ‘belief’ or ‘practice’ is the proper focus for the study of religions has exposed a significant difference between an epistemological-ethical focus and a human anthropologicalpsychological one.9 There is a considerable difference between asking how we justify our beliefs as true (or how we justify our actions on the basis of this knowledge) and what dispositions are actually formed by religious practices (or what forms and re-forms our cognitive virtues). Yet, I am not clear why today these two sets of questions have to be sharply opposed to each other. Essentially, the question of whether philosophy of religion should be ‘beyond belief’ in its philosophical practices makes little sense to those philosophers who understand persons as knowing, acting, feeling and desiring beings. Nevertheless, the question of being ‘post-’ belief – in the sense of moving the focus to a point beyond belief – persists in the field of philosophy of religion amongst practitioners who insist that we can get beyond epistemology and, in particular, beyond modern philosophy’s preoccupation with questions of knowledge and scepticism. Thus we return to the opening question in this chapter, whether or not a post-modern perspective can be separated from the modern; and if not, then how this would support post-Christian as a description of the reinterpretation of Christianity rather than a move beyond it. Certain feminist philosophers of religion will insist – over and against the position taken here – that post-Christians, post-structuralists and post-moderns more generally are giving up arguments about the justification of belief for less exclusive (non-epistemological) questions about religious ritual and habitus.10 The question, then, is whether all or any discussion of belief(s) is incompatible with the qualities which make a post-Christian philosopher of religion. And I wonder, to be blunt, whether it is humanly possible to be post-belief.

8 For a more nuanced and pragmatic approach to the study of the multiple dimensions of ritual, see Catherine Bell, Ritual Perspectives and Dimensions (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 9 This point is relevant for discussions of mystery on the one hand in terms of philosophy as a humanism and in terms of philosophical theology as a study of human religious practices. Compare the following two contemporary, but very different, discussions of mysticism: David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and Mystery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) and Amy Hollywood, ‘Practice, Belief and Feminist Philosophy of Religion’, in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack (eds), Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 225–40. 10 On habitus as the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason which shape experience, see Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 101. For its role with ritual in feminist philosophy of religion, see Hollywood, ‘Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Ritual’, pp. 74–82. For further background on re–defining ‘religion’ in line with post–structuralist perspectives, see Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds), Religion (Cultural Memory in the Present), trans. by David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

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This question will make more sense if we consider it in terms of both feminism and post-modernism. These terms are themselves in tension, and this is a similar tension to that between modernism and post-modernism.11 If post-Christian does derive from claims which have been made about post-modern, then the former (like feminism) is similarly and inextricably linked to the modern. My earlier references to Lyotard come from a context where he asserts: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first post-modern. Post-modern thus understood is not modern at its end but in the nascent state, and this is constant.’12 In these terms, post-Christianity is located within the most contemporary debates about belief in post-modernism and feminism, as these debates currently impact upon contemporary philosophy of religion. To grasp the heart of these debates, it continues to be helpful to read postmodernism in terms of its threefold challenge to the modern belief in (i) the moral progress of humankind in history, (ii) a conception of reason as ushering in universal agreement or certainty and (iii) a grand narrative account of being created human (assuming human sameness, not difference).13 This threefold challenge is already transforming twenty-first century philosophy of religion. Yet there is a more extreme view that post-modernism will ultimately undermine the very essence, or any definition, of religion as literally religio: bond.14 A more technical, post-modern displacement of the modern belief has caused some philosophers to reject epistemological accounts of religion.15 They reject the practice of treating religion as a body of commonly held beliefs which bind believers together, and this implies the rejection of the philosophical activity of seeking to rationally justify beliefs as true. Essentially, there is a wholesale rejection of that which keeps believers as such bound together in their practices. If successful, this move would undermine the very idea of justified true beliefs establishing a foundation for knowledge – but also by implication of justified true beliefs establishing a foundation for the activity of the philosophy of religion as an exercise in legitimation and demystification of religious belief. Knowledge as justified true belief was, more or less, the epistemological focus of modern western philosophy from Descartes in the seventeenth century until the end of the twentieth century when religious scepticism seemed to be replaced with religious genealogies by this post-modern displacement. In this light it has been argued that one of the distinctive features of post-modernism 11 Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy, pp. 53–4 and 87. 12 Lyotard, ‘Note on the Meaning of the Word “Post” and Answering the Question “What is Postmodernism?”’ p. 369. 13 Over the years these challenges have been my own focus; compare my discussions in Anderson, ‘After Theology’, pp. 79–85; A Feminist Philosophy, pp. 53–6; and ‘Postmodernism and Religion’, in Stuart Sim (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, second edition (London: Routledge, 2004). 14 See Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, ‘What if Religio Remained Untranslatable?’, in Goodchild (ed.), Difference in Philosophy of Religion, pp. 87–100. 15 Prominent here is the highly significant criticism of modern Kantian epistemology and ethics of belief in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 46–8, 201–7 and 227–8; and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–17 and 89–99.

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in philosophy of religion is the definite move away from the philosophical focus on the epistemology of religious belief. Already there exist post-modern philosophers of religion who energetically claim to have moved beyond belief.16 Thus, one significant set of questions for the post-Christian is about going beyond belief. Is religion a matter of belief? Or, is seeking to justify religious belief a modern and western distortion of the lived experiences of actual religious communities? As roughly stated above, the post-modern move against a philosophical focus on belief and its justification can be re-enforced by a particular post-colonial insistence that the focus in the field of philosophy of religion should be world religions, not religion in the singular (that is, not post-Enlightenment Christianity alone). The crucial point to make here is that post-modernism and Christianity refers to an ambivalent and uncertain relationship. It is not (yet) clear whether the post-modern Christian is post-Christian in the sense of a rejection of Christianity as liveable and believable, post-Christian in the sense of a transformation of Christianity as liveable for those whose belief has been changed by feminist and other contemporary politics or even post-Christian in the sense of after the shift back from a modern formulation of Christianity as essentially a matter of epistemological belief to Christianity’s radical origins in an orthodox faith. Post-modernism and Fundamentalism: The Irony of Belief Let us turn at this point to perhaps the most straightforward account of the relationship between post-modernism and the Christian religion as two western conceptions. This is a relationship of direct opposition and discontinuity. The account asserts that whereas post-modernism undermines biological, cognitive and moral certainties, religions rest on them. An author of popular books on contemporary philosophy of religion and ethics confirms this for Christianity: … With the advent of Christianity, God was seen as providing … a fixed point of meaning, truth and value in an unstable world. Postmodernism denies that there are any such rocks of certainty. It calls to human beings in the raging sea to abandon the search for rocks, to ‘go with the flow’ and simply to seek to understand where they are.17

I would neither accept nor reject this account as a correct picture of Christianity and post-modernism. This western picture may be true for a certain conception of religion, especially a fundamentalist view of religious belief. Yet, ironically, the contemporary popularity of fundamentalism, despite more mystical practices,

16 See Ellen Armour, ‘Beyond Belief: Sexual Difference and Religion After Ontotheology’, in John Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 212–26; and Hollywood, ‘Practice, Belief and Feminist Philosophy of Religion’, in Anderson and Clack (eds), Feminist Philosophy of Religion, pp. 225–40. 17 Peter Vardy, Being Human: Fulfilling Genetic and Spiritual Potential (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2003), pp. 10–11.

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infiltrates not just Christianity and Islam, but Orthodox Judaism and the Oriental religions.18 It has been argued that fundamentalism in world religions has taken on westernized forms, especially when seeking yet ultimately falling short of a rational quest for knowledge. Ironically, religious fundamentalism appears to be an offshoot of post-modernism itself. Fundamentalists who seek an unequivocal foundation for their beliefs tend to build their certainties point by point in a dependent, but oppositional, relationship to claims concerning post-modern uncertainties. Despite the ease with which an author could map out an oppositional relationship between post-modernism and fundamentalist religions in terms of arguments for and against specific uncertainties, a straightforward separation of the two should be resisted. This separation and opposition has resulted in real life clashes and religious wars. The irony is that the worst extreme of forms of fundamentalism(s) – notably the religious believer who justifies terrorist tactics globally in the present world – is one of the defining features of a post-modern (which, for some philosophers, is synonymous with the post-Christian) world. The post-modern claims about the end of belief have resulted in the opposite. That is, the re-assertion of the most uncritical forms of belief is apparent in the many forms of fundamentalism which have been emerging across the globe, whether in the east or the west! Another issue related to the opposition between post-modernism and religious fundamentalism is moral relativism. That is, the flip side of asserting the absolute values of any fundamentalist position is a relativist account explaining the coexistence of opposing values. Relativism is also raised in the context of conceiving religion in terms of local narratives and practices, whether sustained by universal claims or not. The nature and dangers of this relativism is addressed elsewhere as one of the earliest indications of post-modernism.19 The global increase in fundamentalist religions runs parallel to a more widespread, post-modern celebration of differences of – in this case, religious – perspectives. The religions of the world reflect academic shifts in thinking about belief as well as technological, economic and other cultural transformations. Religions at the beginning of the twenty-first century are inevitably, if at times unwittingly, influenced by certain general characteristics of post-modernism: its fluidity, diversity, uncertainty and, ultimately, its lack of concern with truth (or, as explained earlier, true belief). Post-Christianity and World Religions: Religious Genealogies and Practices It is crucial to post-modernism and religion that Christianity is no longer the central or privileged focus. Post-modernism has shifted both academic and popular concern to world religions. Nevertheless, it is still common for westerners to think of other religions in terms derived from their own values and concepts within a particular Christian tradition. So, it is argued that the implicit westernized Christian values 18 Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999). 19 Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Relativism (London: Routledge, 1992); and Vardy, Being Human.

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and concepts in the study of religions should be uncovered. It has already been suggested that belief as an epistemological term is a primary example of a modern – arguably, western – imposition on the study of religions. For another example, the label ‘Judaeo-Christian’ has come to seem an unwelcome imposition of Christianity as the rightful completion of Jewish tradition. The academic discipline of theology as a systematic study of the traditions and subject matter of the Christian religion faces the uncertainties of its own future. One threat is that theology as essentially study of Christianity will be marginalized, and ultimately replaced, by the more wide-ranging (or inclusive) categories of religious studies and world religions. The changing scene in the academic world gives evidence of the disruption of university departments of theology and of religion by the fluidity of post-modern thinking. The twofold phenomenon of change and of resistance to innovation in the study of religions is an indication of the contemporary process constituting the post-modern transformation of religion, its definition and discipline. As mentioned already, one increasingly popular post-modern contention is that philosophy of religion should no longer be the study and justification of belief in a personal God (that is, theism), but the critical engagement with religious ‘practice’.20 But the focus of this contention often rests on our conception and privileging of reason. Here post-modern critic might claim that philosophy’s obsessive concern with justification is a product of modern philosophy’s privileging of reason. Reason’s role in the justification of theistic beliefs, along with its neutrality and universality are brought into question. Not only does the post-modern critic claim that belief is a western abstraction, but that reason as a faculty of the human mind, not the body, is criticized for being a particular western, male construction. In the extreme case, post-modernism subverts modern philosophy of religion by engaging in genealogical studies of ritual action and bodily practices. Talal Asad has been one of the main advocates of a genealogy of religions which re-conceives ‘ritual’. Ritual is no longer a symbolic action, expressing some psychological or sociological function whose real field of meaning is in the mind or the realm of a social group, but is a ‘disciplinary practice’ or apt performance, forming and reforming religious dispositions.21 In this way, virtues and beliefs are embodied. Thus, ritual performance and disciplinary practices become the crucial forms of signification, instead of philosophical analysis of concepts and their symbolic meanings. And so the post-modern critiques of analytical reason and of symbolic action pose a particular challenge to modern philosophy and, especially, to the equation of religion with belief. If successful, this twofold critique becomes an initial step toward opening up the field of religion to the wider issues of gender, sexuality, class, race and bodily practices as tools for forming religious subjectivities, embodying beliefs, shaping cognitive dispositions and re-forming virtues. Yet there 20 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 21 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, especially pp. 57–8 and 131; Hollywood, ‘Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Ritual’, pp. 74–5; and Keller, ‘Divine Women and the Nehanda Mhondoro’, pp. 68–82.

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are dangers in these genealogical critiques of analytical reason, ritual functions and symbolic action, notably the vulnerability and limited nature of our resistance to and re-formation of disciplinary practices. Mastery Remains in the Grand Narrative(s) of Post-Modern Christianity To grasp a quite different alternative to the use of secular reason to make sense of rituals as symbolic action, consider the Radical Orthodox response to the postmodern incredulity of the master narratives of modern Enlightenment philosophy as the progress of human history and reason. Consider an observation from David Brown concerning the impact of this post-modern critique of a master narrative on Christian theology: Christian theology has conventionally sought to provide … an over-arching narrative, and indeed the term ‘systematic theology’ is often interpreted to mean just that, the attempt to systematize all of reality under a single Christian frame of reference.22

Without analytical reason, the modern philosopher might ask: how can Christianity’s grand narrative tradition be rightly scutinized and be carried on with a new interpretation? Any over-arching narrative, whether modern or medieval, is precisely the target of the post-modern critic Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard’s account of the post-modern ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’ seems to force the conventional conception (as in Brown, above) of Christian theology into a defensive position, if not undermine it completely.23 Admittedly, Brown maintains that the matter is not so simple, and he documents five different theological uses of post-modernism. I will not explore each of these, but one is crucial in this context: rather than rejecting postmodernism as a form of irrationalism, the Radical Orthodox theologians embrace post-modern as a critique of a particular secular framework for universal reason.24 The Radical Orthodox conception of post-modern theology is a response to the incredulity toward the master narrative of Enlightenment philosophy; and in particular, toward the optimistic view of historical progress, secular reason and ‘man’s’ ability to find truth without God (which were described above in terms of a threefold challenge to modern belief). So, unlike the earlier opposition between post-modernism and fundamentalist religions, the Radical Orthodox theology seeks the support of post-modernism in order to create an alternative framework, which would be genuinely universal, since based upon the truth of Christianity under which all of reality fits.25 22 David Brown, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 34. 23 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 24 John Milbank, ‘Problematizing the Secular’, in Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (eds), Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 30–44. 25 John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999).

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Radical Orthodox theology may purport to demonstrate the compatibility of Christian theology with post-modern philosophy, and not with modern epistemology. Radical Orthodox theologians may accept the post-modern claim to dethrone human reason, assuming that this opens the way to the faith of Christianity. And, in contrast, they may reject the modern scepticism which they assumed had rendered Christian faith obsolete, while also making it impossible to demonstrate the certainty of God’s nature and existence. And then, ultimately, post-modern fluidity and uncertainty may seem preferable in protecting the faith of these ‘post-secular philosophers’ (a self-description of Radical Orthodox theologians) to the fixed certainties of secular philosophy. However, not all philosophers or theologians are persuaded by this compatibility. In particular, we should question the description of the move from modern philosophy to post-modern theology as a straightforward change from ‘the secular’ to ‘the post-secular’. Brown recognizes the post-modern irony at the heart of the Radical Orthodox re-conception of Christian theology as the new ‘truthful’ narrative which re-inserts the mastery of Christianity.26 The decisive problem with the claim that another master narrative captures something universal re-emerges with the reality that not everyone – not even every theist or Christian – would accept the Radical Orthodox interpretation of the world as a true (Christian) account of reality and, in particular, as an account of actual human and divine relations. A similar problem arises with other claims, however implicit, to a true master narrative. Alvin Plantinga’s warrant theory of belief is again notable in this regard. Plantinga’s theory of warranted belief becomes an over-arching narrative which is produced and advocated as the exclusively true account for contemporary philosophy of religion. Plantinga raises a general epistemological question: is Christian belief acceptable for intelligent people living in a post-modern world? He answers by arguing that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties. Plantinga’s argument is that humans not only have natural cognitive faculties such as perception, memory and reasoning that allow them to know things, but also have a natural cognitive faculty that enables them to form basic beliefs about God. Plantinga advocates his Reformed epistemology to demonstrate that warrant distinguishes knowledge from true belief.27 But, problematically, he assumes that a notion of sin derived from the theology of John Calvin applies to believers and non-believers: that this natural cognitive faculty can be dulled or damaged by sin. Plantinga’s universal master narrative also assumes that those without Christian beliefs, or certainty, need to have faith ‘repair’ the damaged faculty, in order to have warranted Christian belief.28

26 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, pp. 32–5. 27 Harriet A. Harris, ‘Does Analytical Philosophy Clip Our Wings? Reformed Epistemology as a Test-Case’, in Harriet A. Harris and Christopher Insole (eds), Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 100–118. 28 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Other Responses (for example, Mysticism) Although Radical Orthodoxy and Reformed epistemology each offer their respective master narratives as positive post-modern alternatives to Enlightenment and fundamentalist forms of religion, there are serious worries with these proposed alternatives. The ambivalence between Enlightenment and post-modern conceptions of religion worries certain feminist philosophers of religion, especially when it comes to questions of women’s identity, rationality and autonomy.29 Doesn’t postmodernism run the risk of undermining the many positive advances made for women in religion by the Enlightenment? Women may be loath to give up certain modern values, especially certain positive Christian beliefs about the intrinsic value of every person and of every created aspect of life in this world. Steps taken as part of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to enable and protect women’s self-identities as autonomous rational and moral agents within human communities remain hugely valuable and significant for overcoming various forms of oppression, including sexual, racial, social, material and economic oppression. As a feminist philosopher I must admit critical concern that the creation of a postmodern Christian narrative – whether Radical Orthodoxy or Reformed epistemology – becomes essentially a return to pre-modern conceptions of religion, which were not only dogmatic, but oppressive to women and to all those persons on the margins of socially and economically privileged theological circles. The choice of dogmatism, whether by Plantinga or Milbank, rather than scepticism is not necessarily an attractive or forward-looking alternative for post-Christian women and/or feminist philosophers of religion. Rather than being more inclusive, the conceptions of religion at the heart of master narrative forms of post-modernism exclude all but certain practitioners of Christianity. A similar ambivalence toward post-modernism has characterized feminist debates more widely, in the context of cultural studies and other critical social theories.30 Further responses to post-modernism draw upon yet other aspects in the field of religions and Christian theology. One major response to the post-modern threefold loss of belief focuses upon religious experience understood as essentially outside of the limits of possible knowledge. The terms of this response are compatible with the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant, while this form of post-modern religion(s) becomes an exercise in finding new possibilities in experiencing the impossible. That is, Kant moves modern philosophy to the limits of human knowledge, and this sort of post-modern response runs with the idea that religion lies outside the possible, outside of language, in the realm of mystery and ‘gift’. Post-modern discussions of gift in particular seek to demonstrate the way in which the instability of this concept results in experiencing the impossible: that is, as soon as a donor

29 Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, pp. 51–7 and 241; Dorota Filipczak, ‘Autonomy and Female Spirituality in a Polish Context: Divining a Self’, in Anderson and Clack (eds), Feminist Philosophy of Religion, pp. 198 and 210–22. 30 See Sue Thornham, ‘Postmodernism and Feminism’, in Sim (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, pp. 41–52; cf. Sabina Lovibond, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism, New Left Review, 178 (November–December 1989): 5–28.

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gives someone a gift the recipient is put into debt; this benefits the donor, not to the recipient; but this is exactly the opposite of what the gift is supposed to do. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion present a fascinating, give-and-take interchange on the gift.31 Caputo brings together such post-modern thinkers elucidating the desire to experience the impossible, or to recognize the inscrutable, as the defining element of post-modernism for a new, more inclusive – however mystical – conception of religion. Lyotard is also picked up here to support the desire and possibility of experiencing the impossible in terms of the Kantian sublime. The sublime is an experience of the absolute greatness, which cannot be capped by reason, understanding or imagination.32 But, crucially, for Lyotard, the sublime also always constitutes a barrier to any search for totality. Post-modernism as conceived by Lyotard himself is a movement against all totalizing accounts of ultimate reality. So, any form of religion which seeks or offers a totalizing project is doomed to failure. Nevertheless, post-modern forms of religion shaped by the sublime, its greatness and inexpressibility could (possibly) avoid the problems with limiting religion to the realm of the possible. It is hoped by advocates of this mystically inclined, post-modern religion that these post-Kantian moves may equally avoid the problem of conceiving God, or the divine, in anthropomorphic or gynaecological terms, each of which are exclusive of an opposite sex. Hence, it is not surprising that some feminist theologians and philosophers of religion have found this mystical alternative attractive for religion.33 Yet, there remains the danger of illusion and mystification – dangers which the modern conception of religion aimed to avoid. The various problems and possibilities in turning to accounts of the limits of the human relationship to the divine, the mystical, or that which we do not have the language to describe (or ‘say’) have become the subject of a number of books in contemporary philosophy, in discussions of humanism, mysticism and embodied experiences. I can do no better than refer the reader to the literature currently developing around A. W. Moore’s writings on ineffability, human finitude and the

31 Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), God, The Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IND: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 1–53. 32 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Anayltic of the Sublime, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Berkeley, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1994). 33 For example, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy; and Kitty Scoular Datta, ‘Female Heterologies: Women’s Mysticism, Gender-Mixing and the Apophatic’, in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Haas (eds), Self/Same/Other: Re-visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 125–36. In the latter, Datta represents a renewal in giving theological attention to apophatic experience for those women whose language crosses gender-boundaries and moves toward ineffability. Apophatic describes the experience of emptying of (linguistic) content. This experience is often called mystic and associated with negative theology. Alternatively, the mystic might claim an experience of union with a transcendent being or an absolute oneness. Apophatic, or emptying, practice is sometimes contrasted with cataphatic, or filling, practice in meditation and other religious rites.

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desire or aspiration for infinitude,34 David E. Cooper’s fascinating work on humanism, humility and mystery35 and Amy Hollywood’s highly nuanced study of mysticism, sexual difference and the demands of history.36 Each of these authors is pushing at the limits of the human, of history and of what can be expressed whether in language or in disciplinary practices. Post-Christian philosophy and theology seem to meet on the territory of ineffable knowledge. Conclusion: Religious Belief in an Age of Post-Christian Philosophy It should be obvious that post-Christianity is a topic which opens up a whole array of significant questions for the contemporary religious believer and for students working in the transforming field of philosophy of religion(s). The topic of postChristianity encompasses questions about differences of belief due to the variety of gender, sex, race, ethnicity and global perspectives. We can begin with the question: is religious fundamentalism the only common and so sustainable form of Christianity in our current age of ‘post-X’? But we quickly find that if this is (thought to be) so, then Christianity could be simply rejected as dangerously fixed in fundamentalist oppositions and, therefore, a hopelessly oppressive religion. But the criticism of this ‘answer’ is one of irony: fundamentalist Christians would seem to assert certainties for a global world, which can never even maintain the very forms of security which generate the popularity of fundamentalism. Basically, the fundamentalist revival of a certain form of world religion would seem to be self-defeating, even if it has spread across the globe. Next, what about the response of those philosophers of religion advocating genealogical critiques which would support a philosophy of religious ritual? What would happen to religion if its focus turned to ritual performances as disciplinary practices? Modern philosophy’s focus on the justification of theistic belief may be undermined by the post-modern focus on bodily actions and ritual performances. Yet the definition and value of religion would remain indefinite, only as stable as the practices forming and re-forming its dispositions, only as strong as the power shaping each ritual and only as fixed as the gender of each construction. Now then, what about post-Christian religion taking the position of one of the new master narratives? These narratives have been seen to be compatible with the post-modern critique of the meta-narrative of a universal secular reason. So, at first glance this seems to offer an alternative, which successfully replaces modern scepticism concerning religious belief. However, this at first attractive alternative leaves unresolved the problem that not everyone assents to the universal narrative of 34 A.W. Moore, Points of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 156–7, 186– 94, 195–213 and 277–8; The Infinite, second edition with a new Preface (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 186–200; ‘Ineffability and Religion’, European Journal of Philosophy, 11 (2003); also see Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Ineffable Knowledge and Gender’, in Philip Goodchild (eds), Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 162–84. 35 Cooper, The Measure of Things. 36 Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy.

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Radical Orthodoxy or Reformed epistemology. To say that this failure to assent to what is universal results from sin, or some other lack of faith, grace or such notions seems a seriously inadequate response for any philosophy of religion readily aware of its global context. Finally, is religion in a post-modern world bound to seek (inexpressible) experience of the humanly impossible opened up by the fluidity and uncertainty in the gaps of human reason, understanding and imagination? One answer to this question has been to focus on the post-Kantian sublime, and discover in it the ungraspable heart of religion. For some post-modern philosophers, inexpressible greatness gives a sense of the divine which was not available to modern philosophy. The serious problem which arises concerns the precise content of this religion – mystery, humility and sensible ecstasy sound exciting and rich with possibility but such terms suffer a dramatic loss of particularity and certainty. Just what the embodied experience of ineffability and mystery aspires to – that is, a sense of otherness and difference – is unavailable within the silence of, say, apophatic theology.37 In the end, the contemporary ‘post-’ which defines our post-modern forms of religion remains in an unstable tension with the recognition of multiple concrete material and social differences of people, places, perspectives and practices. When ‘post-’ is made the prefix of Christianity it can be understood as marking a conversion, transformation or new direction from the previous direction of traditional theistic belief. This crucial conception of a conversion from one direction to another may capture the unstable tension characterizing the post-modern relation to the modern, and so the present to the past/future, more generally. But if it is for this reason alone that ‘post-Christian’ becomes an attractive and useful label for the reinterpretation and re-invigoration of Christianity, then care must still be taken to ensure the energy of new beginnings does not become the inertia of old assurances. With this caution in mind, we should return to Lyotard’s definition of ‘postmodernism’ and meaning of ‘post’ which together introduced the topic of this chapter. Let us replace ‘modern’ with ‘Christian’ and conclude positively with the following paraphrase of Lyotard’s previously cited claim. That is: ‘A work can become [Christian] only if it is first [post-Christian]. [Post-Christian] thus understood is not [Christian] at its end but in the nascent state, and this is constant.’38 Thus, not only is there significance in the initial and past upshot of the postChristian work of interpretation of belief which may have been patriarchal, sexist, racist, ethnocentric, and so on, but there exist new possibilities in the same work on belief which will generate significant new ground for the birth of formative, non-patriarchal, non-sexist, non-racist and no longer ethnocentric ideas. And these hoped-for ideas will remain relevant to the present and the future of Christianity, including its relationships with other world religions. With these ideas, we can move confidently in the direction of new possibilities for a post-age feminist philosophy of religion.

37 See footnote 33 above. 38 Lyotard, ‘Note on the Meaning of the Word “Post” and Answering the Question “What is Postmodernism?”’, p. 369.

Chapter 3

Ecofeminist Thea/logies and Ethics: A Post-Christian Movement? Rosemary Radford Ruether

To speak of ecofeminism as a post-Christian movement is somewhat redundant because ecofeminism arose without any special relation to Christianity. Its roots lie in a post-modern critique of Western thought and social structures in relation to women and nature. It emerged first among secular feminists in the late twentieth century and has become a major school of philosophical and social analysis. The word ‘ecofeminism’ was coined in 1972 by Francoise d’Eaubonne who developed the ‘Ecologie-Féminisme’ group, arguing that ‘the destruction of the planet is due to the profit motif inherent in male power’. Her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death) saw women as central to bringing about an ecological revolution.1 Ecofeminism sees an interconnection between the domination of women and the domination of nature. This interconnection is typically made on two levels: ideological–cultural and socio-economic. On the ideological–cultural level women are said to be ‘closer to nature’ than men, more aligned with body, matter, emotions and the animal world. On the socio-economic level, women are located in the spheres of reproduction, child raising, food preparation, spinning and weaving, cleaning of clothes and houses, that are devalued in relation to the public sphere of male power and culture. My assumption is that the first level is the ideological superstructure for the second. In other words, claiming that women are ‘naturally’ closer to the material world and lack the capacity for intellectual and leadership roles justifies locating them in the devalued sphere of material support for male elites and excluding them from higher education and public leadership. Many ecofeminist thinkers extend this analysis from gender to class, race and ethnic hierarchies. That is, devalued classes and races of men and women are likewise said to lack capacity for intellect and leadership, are denied higher education and are located socially in the spheres of material work as serfs, servants and slaves in households, farms and workshops. The fruits of this labour, like that of wives in the family, are appropriated by the male elites as the base for their wealth and freedom to exercise roles of power and culture. These male elites are the master class who define themselves as owning these dependent classes of people. This ruling class inscribes in the systems of law, philosophy and theology a ‘master narrative’ or ‘logic of domination’ that defines the normative human in terms 1 See Carol J. Adams, Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. xi.

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of this male ruling group. For Plato the divine Artisan fashioned human souls from the remnants of the world soul and placed them first in the stars to contemplate the eternal ideas. Then they were placed in bodies on earth and commanded to control the passions that flow from the body. If they succeeded, they would discard the body and return to their star in the heavens. If they failed to do so they would be reincarnated as a woman or a ‘brute.’ They would then have to work their way through successive reincarnations back to the form of an elite male to finally win release from the cycle of rebirth.2 For Plato, the elite Greek male was the normative human. Descartes, a major philosopher for early modern European thought, deepened the dualism between mind and body, seeing all bodily reality as mere ‘dead matter’ pushed and pulled by mechanical force. The mind stands outside matter contemplating and controlling it from beyond. In modern liberal thought essential humanity corresponds to rationality and moral will. Humans are seen as autonomous egos ‘maximizing their self-interests’ who form social contracts to protect their property and in which their individual pursuit of profit can be guided by an ‘invisible hand’ to the benefit of the larger society. Although such views of the self claim to define the generic ‘human’, what is assumed here is the male educated and propertied classes. Dependent people, women, slaves, workers, peasants and colonized peoples are made invisible. They are de facto lumped with instrumentalized nature.3 This master narrative, with its logic of domination, has structured Mediterranean and western societies for thousands of years. Since the sixteenth century it has been extending its control throughout the globe, eliminating smaller indigenous societies with alternative, more egalitarian and nature-sustaining social and cultural patterns. Most other urban civilizations and religions, such as Hinduism in India and Confucianism in China, also developed patriarchal ideologies with similar social expressions, as we have seen in our survey of world religions. But even these earlier patriarchal worldviews, which retained some sense of the sacrality of nature, are being subordinated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by the one triumphant master narrative of western science and market economics. How do ecofeminists envision a transformation of this deeply rooted and powerful ideology and social system? Some feminists have objected to any link between women’s domination and that of nature, seeing this as reduplicating the basic patriarchal fallacy that women are closer to and more like non-human nature than men. They believe that women need to claim their equal humanity with male humans, their parallel capacity for rationality and leadership.4 They too, like males, are separate from and called to rule over nature. In effect this solution to women’s subordination ends with assimilating a few elite women into the male master class,

2 Plato, Timaeus 49–50. See also Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 22–4. 3 See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 104–40. 4 On the essentialist debate about ecofeminism, see, for example, Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 44–70. Also Stephanie Lahar, ‘Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics’, in Karen J. Warren, Ecological Feminist Philosophies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 11–12.

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without changing the basic hierarchies of this ruling class over subordinated humans and non-humans. Most women remain subordinated in the home and in low paid, menial jobs, even as a few elite women make it into the cabinets and boardrooms of the powerful. The same can be said of racial, ethnic men and women. A Colin Powell or a Condoleezza Rice may be able to enter the inner circle of the Bush administration by virtue of high achievement while being totally supportive of global American hegemony, but most Black men and women are in the marginalized and impoverished sectors of American society. Such token inclusion of women, Black or White, and racial ethnic men, buttresses the claim that American society is completely inclusive and is open to talent from whatever group. The many who do not ‘make it’ have no one to blame but themselves. This show of ‘equality’ thus masks the reality of a system in which the super wealth and power of the few depends on the exploitation of the many. Some ecofeminists do claim that there is some truth in the ideology that women are ‘closer to nature’. They see this closeness as having been distorted by patriarchy to dominate both women and nature as inferior to male humans. But this distortion is rooted in an essential truth that women by virtue of their child-bearing functions are more attune to the rhythms of nature, more in touch with their own bodies, more holistic. Women need to claim this affinity with nature and take the lead in creating a new earth-based spirituality and practice of care for the earth.5 Most ecofeminists, however, reject an essentializing of women as more in tune with nature by virtue of their female body and maternity. They see this concept of affinity between women and nature as a social construct that both naturalizes women and feminizes non-human nature, making them appear more ‘alike’. At the same time, by socially locating women in the sphere of bodily and material support for society, women may also suffer more due to the abuse of the natural world and hence also become more aware of this abuse. But this is a matter of their experience in their particular social location, not due to a different ‘nature’ than males. Moreover, such concerns would vary greatly by class and cultural location. An elite western woman living within the technological comforts of affluent, urban society may be oblivious to the stripping of forests, and the poisoning of water, while a peasant woman who has to struggle for the livelihood of her family in immediate relation to these realities is acutely aware of them. Such awareness, of course, does not translate directly into mobilization for change. For that, one needs a conscious recognition of these connections and a critical analysis of the larger forces that are bringing them about, together with the rise of leadership that can translate this into organized resistance to dominant powers and efforts to shape alternatives to them. One must also question the universality of the cultural ideology of culture over nature as male over female. Pre-urban people who depend primarily on huntinggathering and small-scale agriculture often have very different patterns of thought. Often males are associated with either wild nature (the sphere of hunting) or the fields which men control, with women associated with the domestic realm. The 5 Mellor speaks of this view as ‘affinity ecofeminism’, pp. 56–8, 75–7. The complexity of this ‘affinity’ can be seen in an essay such as that by Charlene Spretnak, ‘Earthbody and Personal Body as Sacred’, in Adams, Ecofeminism and the Sacred, pp. 261–80.

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male sphere is often seen as superior to that of women, but this may be a matter of opinion, with women seeing their work as equal or better. A hierarchical sphere of male elites controlling culture and politics has not yet subsumed these earlier patterns that relate the whole society more directly to the fields and forests. But these earlier peoples have today been largely subordinated to male elite cultures that identify themselves with a culture transcendent to nature and regard tribal and peasant peoples as inferior.6 Ecofeminist hope for an alternative society calls for a double conversion or transformation. Social hierarchies of men over women, white elites over subordinated classes and races, need to be transformed into egalitarian societies which recognize the fullness of humanity of each human person. But if this change is not to be mere tokenism which does little to change the basic hierarchies of wealth and power of the few over the many, there must be a major restructuring of the relations of human groups to each other, together with a basic restructuring of the relation between humans and the non-human world. Humans need to recognize that they are one species among others within the ecosystems of earth; they need to embed their systems of production, consumption and waste within the ways that nature sustains itself in a way that recognizes their intimate partnership with non-human communities.7 In this essay I will compare ecofeminist perspectives that are emerging from within two different religious and cultural contexts. The first will be the thought and practice of Starhawk and Carol Christ who have emerged from within North American neo-pagan or earth-based spiritualities. The second will be the work of Ivone Gebara, a Brazilian ‘post-Christian’ nun who has become a major force for spreading an ecofeminist worldview among Latin American women, some of whom continue to define themselves as Christians, Catholics or Protestants, and others of whom do not. North American Neo-paganism: Women and Nature Starhawk (née Miriam Simos), is a Wiccan priestess, psychotherapist and social activist. She is a Californian of Jewish background who was drawn into the Neopagan spirituality movement in the 1970s.8 In the 1980s she was increasingly involved in the anti-war movement and began to shape an understanding of neopagan ritual linked to and expressed in grassroots political action. Starhawk roots her vision of an alternative society and relation to the natural world in a myth of an original matricentric society that pre-existed patriarchy in human evolution. In this society the divine was understood as the immanent life 6 See discussion of the relativity of culture–nature hierarchies and its inapplicability to tribal and peasant peoples in Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen, Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context and Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), especially chapters 3 and 4, pp. 41–71. 7 For an effort to imagine an ecofeminist society, see Ruether, Gaia and God, pp. 258–68. 8 Starhawk’s first major book was The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1979, 2nd edition, 1989).

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force that animates all reality, linking all humans with one another and with the nonhuman world in one community of life which exists in a cycle of birth, growth, decay, death and rebirth in new organic forms. There was no hierarchy of men over women, masters over slaves or humans over nature. This ecological egalitarian society was gradually subverted by the rise of patriarchy in the Neolithic and Bronze ages, but its essential vision has lived on in indigenous peoples’ cultures throughout the world. Starhawk sees herself as recovering the shamanistic culture of pre-patriarchal societies of the British Isles.9 In her ritual and therapeutic work Starhawk differentiates between three kinds of power: ‘power over’, ‘power within’ and ‘power with’. ‘Power over’ is the basic mode of power of patriarchal societies. It expresses the logic of domination by which some, mostly elite, males dominate women and subjugated classes and races, as well as the non-human world. This kind of power is fundamentally competitive. The more power one side has, the less the other side has. The wealthy and powerful gain their wealth and power by exploiting those they dominate, while forcing them to accept their impoverished and dominated position. ‘Power within’, by contrast, is a process by which dominated people shake off the control of others and their own internalization of the powerlessness and inferiority projected on to them, laying hold of their own innate power and goodness. ‘Power with’ is the development of ways to share power that does not negate others in order to affirm oneself, but can mutually affirm one another, while being able to acknowledge the special talents of particular people. In these relations of mutual empowerment each person flourishes by also promoting the flourishing of others.10 As a priestess and therapist, Starhawk sees ritual as a group dynamic by which people are freed from their need to dominate others, learn to experience their own inner power and beauty and affirm this power in one another. As a social activist in the anti-war movement and global justice movements, Starhawk has translated this small group ritual practice into practical guidelines for street protests against the police who defend the systems of global power. She teaches the groups she works with how to maintain their own calm in the face of repressive violence, defuse explosive situations and craft creative symbolic actions to communicate alternative visions. In her 2002 volume, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising,11 Starhawk describes her involvement in direct action movements against the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, starting with the mass protests in Seattle in 1999. This involvement continues in the street protests against these international organizations of globalization in Prague in September 2000, Quebec in April 2001 and Genoa in July of that year. Starhawk also reflects on her experiences as a participant in the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. 9 See her comments in the 1989 edition of The Spiral Dance, pp. 16–17. Also her book, Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 18–19. 10 See her Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon, 1982), pp. 1–15; also Truth or Dare, pp. 8–19. 11 Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers.

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Through her descriptions of her involvement as a trainer for these street actions, especially in the second half of the book, she delineates her own understanding of creative transformative action and her vision of an alternative society. This new society must be rooted in finding our just place in nature. For Starhawk this interconnection of justice and ecology is rooted in her experience as a permaculture gardener. Permaculture gardening demands the establishment of a deep relationship with a particular area of land. One must observe it carefully, learn about its natural cycles and what grows there best. Gardening becomes truly a cultivation of the land based on holistic knowing of its own dynamics, rather than an imposition of human demands disconnected with these dynamics. To recreate the world from its present alienated state, we must put down roots and become again ‘indigenous’ to our chosen place of settlement.12 Democratic or ‘horizontal’ organizing in the social justice movement, for Starhawk, is parallel to permaculture gardening. One does not impose power from outside the community in a top down way, but nurtures power within each person and their ability to share power with each other to enhance their mutual empowerment. Similarly in permaculture, one attunes oneself to the seasons and patterns of the land, and the interrelation of plants, insects and animals with each other, in order to bring forth its best fruits, rather than imposing on it monocultures of plants foreign to it. Violent ways of treating the earth and violent ways of treating other humans are both inherently unstable. Neither form of violence nurtures the natural energies of those who are abused and so demand continual inputs of force to maintain themselves. The present global economy is based on deepening impoverishment of the vast majority of the earth’s people and the land for the excessive profits of the super rich, while also creating a shrinking middle class. The awareness of this inequity is growing with mass communication. The deprived and colonized people are becoming more critical and angry toward what is seen as a new empire led by the United States. The United States thus has become the major militarist, with a coerced cooperation of a few other nations to give its military aggression the fig leaf of a ‘coalition’, although outside the consensus of the United Nations. Such an unjust and violent system is clearly headed for collapse. Starhawk explores several scenarios for transformation. The present unjust system maintained by violence could drag on for an indefinite period. Or, like the Titanic, it could hit an unseen obstacle and suddenly collapse, creating great chaos for all peoples and the earth. There could be a fascist takeover by ruthless groups determined to continue the present patterns of domination, or replace them with a similar pattern. There might also be a gradual transformation to a new society. Or there could be a sudden revolutionary uprising in which a militant group, representing the deprived people, could take over the reins of government and seek to refashion them. Starhawk sees deep problems with all these scenarios. The revolutionary option typically fashions the revolutionaries in the mould of the present power holders, in

12 Ibid., pp. 160–68.

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the very process of fighting to defeat them, and so they tend to reinstate a new system of domination, rather than really changing the model.13 The preferred model is the one of gradual change. But she sees the present power holders manifest in American militarism, global corporations and the agencies of economic global control, such as the WTO, as having mobilized to undermine and defeat the efforts of gradual reform, blocking efforts such as global climate treaties and laws for environmental protection. Those, like herself, committed to global justice and ecological sustainability need to operate on two fronts. They must use public protest and communication media to delegitimize the present system. They must also shape alternatives that model the needed new society, starting in their own local communities. Starhawk suggests five principles of a sustainable economy: a shift to renewable energy, such a solar and wind energy; a return to human labour rather than reliance on machines; continual recycling of the waste side of production and consumption as fertilizer and materials for new growth and production; the cultivation of biological and cultural diversity and creativity, turning around the present trend toward monocultures; and, finally, efficiency, in the sense of doing more with less use of resources.14 Starhawk outlines nine keynotes for a new world society. These are: 1) the protection of the viability of life sustaining systems of the planet presently under attack, applying the principles above; 2) rejecting the commodification of vital resources, such as water; 3) returning control of natural and human resources to local control from global corporations; 4) protecting the land and cultural heritages of indigenous peoples; 5) establishing enterprises rooted in local communities and responsible to them; 6) creating opportunities to fulfil needs and dreams open to all human beings; 7)just compensation, security and dignity to labour; 8) collective responsibility as the human community to assure that all members can meet their basic needs for life and growth and 9) participatory democracy in which all members of the community have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives.15 For Starhawk, such principles of society and sustainable ecology demand a return of much of the control to local communities, turning around the trends toward more and more centralization of power in global institutions. This vision is not one simply to hope for in a distant future, but defines a practice that must be lived now. Local communities must themselves seek to take back power and define their own relations to each other and the land in a just, life sustaining way. Global justice groups need to see themselves as a network of both protest against the global system and mutual support for local community projects. We need to live the revolution now! The second major neo-pagan thinker I discuss here is Carol Christ. Christ grew up in a Christian family of mixed denominational backgrounds and did her graduate work in theology at Yale University. There she became increasingly alienated from Christianity as both sexist and anti-semitic and was drawn into the Goddess spirituality movement, studying with Starhawk. Moving from religious studies to women’s studies, she taught for a while in San José State College in California. But 13 Ibid., pp. 251–5. 14 Ibid., pp. 244–5. 15 Ibid., pp. 237–41.

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she experienced increasing burnout with the American academic rat race and began to journey to Greece to lead Goddess pilgrimages through visits to ancient settings. Finally she moved to live in Greece permanently. In contrast to white Americans, she found in Greece people deeply embedded in their local land with its roots back into prepatriarchal times. Even though their religion and culture is patriarchal, many of their churches signal a cave or other holy site of Goddess worship. Many icons venerate Mary as the Panagia (All Holy) Mother linked with sacred trees.16 Christ sees the ‘fall into patriarchy’ less as a sudden overthrow of earlier societies by horse-riding invaders and more as a gradual process of change from earlier gardening societies where women played a predominant role. A male takeover of land and its produce, slavery and organized warfare shaped new societies based on domination of women, subjugated peoples and the non-human world. Myths of the defeat and slaying of the Goddess supported this takeover. Goddess religion, for her, is an effort to resurrect the egalitarian harmony between humans, men and women, and nature of prepatriarchal times. What this was cannot be known exactly. So much of this work must be acknowledged as an imaginative effort in post-modern times that seeks to deconstruct the patterns of patriarchal religion and envision how its alienated hierarchical dualisms can be reintegrated in a life-giving communion.17 Christ seeks to avoid any essentializing of the female as ‘naturally’ more in harmony with nature. One should not simply reverse patriarchal hierarchical dualisms, lifting up body, femaleness and feelings as the superior side. Rather one has to bring together male and female, mind and body, heaven and earth, feeling and thinking, light and dark, the one and the many, transcendence and immanence in an interactive relationality.18 In her 2003 book, She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World,19 Christ seeks to define this thealogical stance through the lens of process theology, specifically the thought of Charles Hartshorne. Basic to this thealogical vision is a rejection of the ‘omnis’ of patriarchal deity, omniscient, omnipotent, immutable, unchangeable goodness. These ‘omnis’ make deity in the image of perfected patriarchal domination, controlling all, but in a one-sided unrelational way, guaranteeing to its followers infallible knowledge and immortality of the soul after death.20 Feminist process thought, by contrast, starts with the reality that all is finite and all is changing. Mutability, constant change in a cycle of birth, growth, decline, death and renewal, is the basic pattern of life and maintenance of life. Humans are an integral part of this process of mutability, not outside it or able to escape from it into some static eternal world. This changing reality is not one of fragmented selves unrelated to each other, but a texture of interrelationship. There is no ‘I’ without a

16 See her Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 50–60. 17 Ibid., pp. 62–7, 98–104, 158–9, 170–76. 18 Ibid., pp. 109–12. 19 New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2003. 20 Ibid., pp. 25–44.

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‘Thou’, no self without its reciprocal interaction with many other selves, human and non-human.21 Deity in feminist process thought is integral to this process, not outside it. But for Christ deity does not stand for all possible kinds of change, good or bad. Deity is the lure to goodness, to embodied love and life-giving relationality. Humans have free will to choose alienated, hostile relations, but this is against the primary thrust of reality that is toward harmonization of life in positive flourishing. Life is finite. Chance, as well as negative affect and denial of love, causes tragedy and suffering. There is no infallible knowledge, but only contextualized knowledge of where we need to go from where we are now, in particular situations. No all-powerful deity assures us a good outcome. Indeed, the forces of negativity caused by rejection of love and relationship are deeply embedded in the world systems since the rise of patriarchy. We can only respond to the positive lure of the divine within life by trying to fashion life-giving communities here and there as best we can. The fact that there is no infallible assurance of victory does not mean that there is not always abundant energy for creativity and transformation which we need to avail ourselves of in every moment and situation to deconstruct negative relations and fashion life-giving ones. Christ ends the book with a series of prayers, by which she hopes to refashion the way we experience the divine in the world. She suggests we rise each day with the salutation to the rising sun: ‘As this day dawns in beauty, we pledge ourselves to repair the web.’22 Ivone Gebara and Latin American Ecofeminism I now turn to the thought of the leading ecofeminist theologian in Latin America, Ivone Gebara. Gebara is a Brazilian and a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame. For sixteen years she taught theology and philosophy to seminarians and lay ministers at the Theology Institute in Recife, Brazil. Since this institute closed with the accession of a more conservative bishop, she has continued to live in a poor neighbourhood in Recife, and travels and lectures worldwide. In her book, Intuitiones Ecofeministas (Ecofeminist Intuitions), Gebara talks about how she came to adopt an ecofeminist perspective.23 Although Gebara acknowledges the criticism of some Latin American feminists that ecofeminism continues the stereotyping of women as ‘closer to nature’, she believes that her own viewpoint has nothing to do with such essentialist anthropology. Rather it springs from her concrete experience in her impoverished neighbourhood. There she observes that poor women are the ones who primarily have to cope with the problems of air pollution, poverty, poor quality of food and lack of clean drinking water. This creates health problems for themselves and their children for which they are primarily responsible.24

21 22 23 24

Ibid., pp. 45–92. Ibid., p. 240. Intuitiones Ecofeministas, published in Madrid, Spain: Editorial Trotto, 2000. Ibid., pp. 22–4.

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Gebara speaks of doing her theology ‘between noise and garbage’. The noise is that of a crowded neighbourhood with machinery, trucks and cars that lack mufflers, but also the shouts and music of the people as they find ways to survive each day. The garbage is the waste of society disproportionately discarded where the poor live, with little organized clean-up. To do one’s theology amidst noise and garbage is to do it in daily awareness of the oppression of the poor and the degradation of their environment. It is also to do theology inspired by the vitality of the poor who manage somehow to keep going and even sometimes to celebrate despite these challenge.25 Gebara sees her ecofeminist theology as a third stage of feminist theological work in Latin America. In the first stage in the 1970s a new feminist movement was arising in Latin America and feminist theologies were being translated from Germany and North America. Stimulated by these influences, Latin American women theologians realized that ‘we are oppressed as historical subjects. We discovered our oppression in the Bible, in theology, in our churches.’ The response was to look for liberating female role models in the bible, Jesus’ women disciples, biblical matriarchs and prophetesses. In the second phase they began to question the dominance of masculine theological symbols and to search for feminine symbols for God, such as wisdom.26 For Gebara both of these phases are still expressions of a ‘patriarchal feminism’, a feminism which has not deeply examined the androcentric model of theology, of God and the cosmos, but is simply seeking to include women in it. Gebara sees ecofeminism as moving to a new and more radical stage of feminism. This stage calls for a deconstruction of patriarchal thinking, with its hierarchical structure and methodology of thought. Ecofeminism seeks to dismantle the whole paradigm of male over female, mind over body, heaven over earth, transcendent over immanent, the male God outside of and ruling over the created world, and to imagine an alternative to it. When changing the patriarchal paradigm for an ecofeminist, one starts with epistemology, with transforming the way one thinks. Patriarchal epistemology bases itself on eternal unchangeable ‘truths’ that are the presuppositions for knowing what truly ‘is’. In the Platonic-Aristotelian epistemology that shaped Catholic Christianity, this means eternal ideas that exist a priori, of which physical things are pale and partial expressions. Catholicism added to this the hierarchy of revelation over reason. Revealed ideas come directly from God and thus are unchangeable and unquestionable, compared to ideas derived from reason. Gebara, by contrast, wishes to start with experience, especially the embodied experiences of women in daily life. Experiences cannot be translated into thought finally and definitively. They are always in context, in a particular network of relationships. This interdependence and contextuality includes not only other humans, but the non-human world, ultimately the whole body of the cosmos in which we are embedded in our particular location. Theological ideas are not exempt 25 Ivone Gebara, ‘A Cry for Life from Latin America’, in K.C. Abraham and Bernadette Mbuy-beya, Spirituality of the Third World: A Cry for Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1994), pp. 109–18. 26 ‘Ecofeminism and Panentheism’, interview by Mary Judy Ress, Creation Spirituality (November–December, 1993), pp. 9–11.

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from this questioning from the point of view of embodied, contextual experience. In addressing ideas, such as God as Trinity, she asks: ‘To what experience is this idea related?’ What, in our embodied daily life, is the basis for thinking about reality as trinitarian and hence ultimately of God as Trinity?27 Such an effort to dismantle patriarchal epistemology for ecofeminist thinking includes the nature of the human person. How do we move from a patriarchal to an ecofeminist understanding of the self? Patriarchal theology and philosophy start with a disembodied self that is presumed to exist prior to all relationships. In Platonic thought this actually means individual souls that pre-existed in the heavens and only later were incarnated in bodies. The body is seen primarily as an impediment to the soul to be controlled, not an integral part of the self. The ideal self is the autonomous self, the self that has extricated itself from all dependencies on others and stands outside and independent of relationships as a ‘free subject’. In this view of the human only elite men are fully selves; women and subjugated people are by definition dependent. Such a view, of course, depends on making invisible this whole structure of support on which the apparent male freedom itself is ‘dependent’. This notion of autonomy and independence is translated into corporate realities, autonomous nations and global corporations. Such corporations dominate and control all else, turning them into things and making invisible their dependency on them. Claiming to be a law unto themselves, they assume they can trample on local societies and intervene in their lives whenever they are seen to be a threat to their ‘way of life’. Obviously not all nations can behave in this way, but only nations that claim hegemonic power, and finally only one nation, the Number One, who has a right to rule over all others.28 An ecofeminist understanding of the human person, by contrast, starts with the person in a network of relationships. The person does not exist first and then assumes relationships, but the person is constituted in and by relationships. One does not seek to extricate oneself from relationships in order to become ‘autonomous’. Such autonomy is a delusion based on denial of the others on whom one depends. Rather one seeks to become ever more deeply aware of the interconnections on which one’s own life depends, ultimately the network of relations of the whole cosmos. One seeks to shape those relations in ways that are more life giving and reciprocal, to respect the integrity of the other beings to whom one is related, even as one is respected by them and respects oneself. To be is to be related; shaping the quality of those relations is the critical ethical task.29 This reflection on the network of relationality, which reaches from the most intimate relation with one’s own body-self to interpersonal relations, to inter-group relations to each other and humans to earth, culminates finally in recognizing our interrelations with and dependency on the whole cosmos. It is from this understanding 27 Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), pp. 25–65. Also Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1996), pp. 13–23. 28 Gebara, Longing for Running Water, pp. 71–6. 29 Ibid., pp. 82–92.

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of inter-relationality that Gebara bases her reflection on the meaning of God as Trinity. For Gebara, God as Trinity is not a revelation from on high which one imposes on people as eternal and unchangeable truth outside of and incomprehensible to daily experience. Rather the idea of God as Trinity is itself an extrapolation from our daily experience of interrelationships. For Gebara, the Trinity is a way of expressing the dynamic of life as interrelational creativity. Creativity by its nature ramifies into diversity while at the same time interconnecting in community, leading to new diversification. This process of dialectical diversification and intercommunion can be seen on every level of reality. Gebara starts with the development of the cosmos itself, following Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s account in the Universe Story.30 Starting with one concentrated nucleus of energy, the universe explodes into expanding diversity. Then part of this diversity is destroyed as new stages of creativity develop. The whole unfolds as a process on ongoing interconnectivity. The same pattern is repeated on the level of planet earth. The biosphere unfolds in increasing diversity of species, allowing phases of extinction and new development of diversification in a process of co-creation and interconnection. Humans also divide into many races and cultures. They develop new stages of interconnection and communication as they shape an increasingly unified community of human life on earth. So also interpersonal society and, finally, the person herself exist in a dynamic of diversification and interdependency.31 This story of trinitarian dialectics as the process of creation of life on earth raises the issue of good and evil. If whatever develops is part of a natural process, from whence come systems of violence and oppression? Gebara insists that there is good and evil in natural life itself. Natural life exists in a dynamic tension of life and death, creativity and vulnerability. Death is an integral part of life, not foreign to it, as traditional Christian cosmology had claimed. But the very vulnerability and fragility of life provides the impulse for possible distortion of this dialectical process. Each person in its species context seeks to protect and expand its own life against others that compete with it. Nature limits the extent to which some species can expand at the expense of others. When some exceed their life support niche by destroying others on whom they depend, this precipitates the collapse of the dominant group.32 But humans have developed an ability to stand out somewhat from these limits. They have been able to organize their own species’ power in relation to land and animals to monopolize means of life. This takes place in the context of some humans seizing power and organizing relations with other humans so these subjugated people do the brute labour. Those in power extract this into means of wealth, dominating

30 Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992). 31 See above, note 25. 32 See her reflections on ‘The Trinity and the Problem of Evil’, in Ruether, Women Healing Earth, pp. 19–22.

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power and leisure for themselves at the expense of others, while claiming to represent the well being of ‘all’. This pattern of construction of systems of exploitative power of some humans over others and over the non-human world has been endlessly repeated through human history, since the rise of plough agriculture, warfare, slavery and social hierarchy in early human ‘civilizations’. These systems of exploitative distortion are always based on denying the interconnection of the powerful with the powerless, men with women, ruling class with slaves, workers and peasants. Those on top imagine themselves as ‘autonomous’ and naturally superior, while the inferiority of those they rule over demands their subjugation. Thus the systems of exploitation ‘naturalize’ themselves by shaping ideologies that pretend that these systems simply represent the ‘order of creation’ and the will of God or the gods. We are now living in the nadir of this system of distortion that has grown increasingly centralized worldwide, while impoverishing the majority of humans and the earth more and more. Yet this system continues to claim that the privations it imposes on others are necessary for all to eventually prosper and attain comfort and leisure equivalent to the affluent. If the poor but ‘tighten their belts’ a bit more, the wealth generated at the top will ‘trickle down’ and ‘lift all boats’. But this is a fallacious ideology belied by reality. This system of distortion, violence, impoverishment and oppression is immoral or ‘unnatural’ evil, built on the denial of interconnection of all beings with one another. For Gebara there is no original paradise of blessedness without finitude or death at the beginning of human history, nor is it possible to construct a paradise of deathless goodness in some future millennium. Rather humans need to accept our limits, our fragility, our texture of joy and sorrow within finite life. What we can and must do is to dismantle the systems of distortion that allow some few humans to flourish inordinately at the expense of most other humans and the earth. We must shape egalitarian societies where joys and sorrows, flourishing within fragile limitations, are shared more equally and more justly between humans and between humans and the other earth beings with whom we share this planet. This is the very real but limited utopia which Gebara allows herself, recognizing that within our lives today we can expect only momentary glimpses of this more justly shared life in interconnected mutuality.33 Conclusions This account of the ecofeminist thea/logies and ethical theories from two North America neo-pagans and a Latin American Catholic nun reveals considerable commonality. The three share a critique of western epistemology based on the isolated knower outside of and unrelated to the reality that is known, whose knowledge is a means of control over others. They question a model of the self based on the isolated individual disconnected from relationships that ignores the actual support services 33 See particularly her chapter on ‘Women’s Experience of Salvation’, in Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002), pp. 109–44.

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that other humans and nature are providing to allow for this privileged appearance of the ‘autonomous’ self. They are also rejecting a view of nature as ‘dead matter’ to be dominated, in favour of an understanding of nature as living beings in dynamic communities of life. They are calling for democratic relationships between humans, men and women, ethnic groups and those presently divided by class and culture. They are calling for a new sense of partnership between humans and nature. The keynotes of interrelationship, interdependency and mutuality echo across all three perspectives, calling for a renewed sense of how humans should relate to one another and with the natural world. This commonality of ecofeminist ideas across these different contexts and cultures reflects a shared grappling with deep conflicts, struggles and changes of consciousness that are happening worldwide. The destructive impact of a pattern of ‘dominology’, rooted in top-down epistemology and a concept of the self and its relation to other humans and nature, is widely seen as the root of the evils of sexism, racism and imperialism, with its ongoing expressions in neo-colonial exploitation of third world societies and their natural resources. Groups of people around the world are struggling to change these patterns. Certain common ideas of the needed alternatives are emerging in many contexts and linking up with one another. It is widely assumed that there is a need to re-found local community, in democratic face-to-face relations with the variety of people, men and women, across classes and ethnic groups, living in that community. There is a need for the renewed local community to redevelop its relation to its land, its agriculture, its water in a sustainable way based on community decision-making that takes all parties, including non-human nature, into consideration. This also means withdrawing from the global centralized systems of control that have been forged by colonialism and neocolonialism. By banding together in local and regional communities of accountability, it is hoped that this globalized system of domination can be undermined and perhaps overthrown altogether for new ways of networking local communities across regions and across the globe. Visions of humans in interrelation with one another and with nature express a longing for an alternative way of situating people in relation to society and the world. To see nature itself as a living matrix of interconnection provides the cosmological basis for this alternative vision of relationship. This common ecofeminist theology or worldview shares some of the following characteristics. There is a rejection of a splitting of the divine from the earth and its communities of life to project ‘God’ as a male personified entity located in some super-celestial realm outside the universe and ruling over it. The concept of God is deconstructed. The divine is understood as a matrix of life-giving energy that is in, through and under all things. Although arising independently of each other, the concept of the sacred that is emerging from North American neo-paganism and Latin American post-Catholic ecofeminism is remarkably similar.34 34 Christ and Starhawk never cite Gebara in their works nor does Gebara cite Christ or Starhawk. Apparently the North Americans are not acquainted with Gebara’s work and vice versa.

Chapter 4

Material Elements: The Matter of Women, The Matter of Earth, The Matter of God Anne Elvey

The matter of Earth – of air, water, soil, forests, stones, seeds, kangaroos, wattles, eucalypts, viruses, magpies, tiger snakes, creeks, humans, mosquitos, mountains and seas – and the matter of women’s lives intertwine in complex ways that cannot be reduced to a simple identification of woman with Earth. Nonetheless, ecofeminist theorists and theologians insist that women, bodies and Earth have each been treated as the ‘other’ within a framework of hierarchical dualism which celebrates the mastery of a particular, limited kind of rationality.1 Val Plumwood clearly marks out several of the strategies by which this limited and destructive rationality operates: radical exclusion; homogenisation and stereotyping; backgrounding and denial; incorporation; and instrumentalisation. At the same time as continuing a socialist politics and ethics, she moves in recent work to claim a space for a materialist spirituality that affirms matter.2 Aware of some of the difficulties in affirming matter in this way, in particular the problem which Plumwood3 herself describes, of reinvoking through reversal the colonizing logic one seeks to unsettle, I want in this essay to explore the possibility of an ecofeminist material transcendence. That is, in the terms of this collection, to consider the possibilities and challenges for Christian theologies of a focus on matter 1 See, for example, Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (New Delhi: Zed Books, Kali for Women, 1988); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1992); Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (North Melbourne, Spinifex, 1993); Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London and New York, Routledge, 2002); Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London: Zed Books,1997); Chris Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (London and New York, Routledge, 1998); Kate Rigby, ‘The Goddess Returns: Ecofeminist Reconfigurations of Gender, Nature, and the Sacred’, in Frances Devlin Glass and Lyn McCreddin (eds), Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 23–54. 2 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, pp. 218–35. 3 Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, pp. 61–2.

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not simply as a site of divine immanence. I propose that we consider matter as itself in some sense already transcendent in a way that brings us back to a materiality – ours and others; human and more than human – which is self-transcendent and which mediates the transcendence of the other and of the divine. I begin by considering the category of transcendence. With an ear to Luce Irigaray’s feminist appraisal that women have been excluded from transcendence, I turn then to an invocation of the traditional four elements – earth, air, fire and water – suggesting something of their relationship to transcendence. Then I move to consider the matter of God, reflecting on some ecofeminist questions raised about the absence of matter from the transcendent. Finally, I suggest some ways in which the concept of a material transcendence can express an ecofeminist orientation toward the plural otherness of matter. Transcendence? The idea of transcendence expresses an orientation toward the other. In traditional theologies this transcendent orientation is toward something or someone we call ‘God’ and perceive as a super-natural other.4 But transcendence more generally can be thought of as expressing an orientation (which may be both human and more than human) to a vast array of others, an orientation which is already part of the being toward the other of matter, a being toward which describes the inherent sociality of matter.5 For humans to live consciously this sociality – this being toward the other – is to enter a kind of transcendent engagement and to be open to the transformative effects of a material transcendence that may or may not be divine. It is to allow that, 4 Alister McGrath, ‘Rahner’, in Alister McGrath (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Modern Christian Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 540. Stemming from the Latin transcendere meaning ‘to climb over’, ‘surpass’ or ‘go beyond’, transcendence can be taken to describe ‘God as being over and beyond the created order in all aspects’ (B. A. Gendreau ‘Transcendence’, in Thomas Carson and Joann Cerrito (eds), The New Catholic Encyclopaedia, Second edition, vol. 14, Thi-Zwi (The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, 2003), p. 141; Donald McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), p. 285. For Christian thought, a Hebrew understanding of divine difference from humankind as expressed in the Bible, and the Platonic notion of the good beyond being and knowing offer two bases for the notion of divine transcendence (John McIntyre ‘Transcendence’, in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds), A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, (London: SCM Press, 1983), pp. 576–7). The concept of transcendence is founded in human experience, specifically in ‘the difference between thought and perception’ (Karl Lehmann ‘Transcendence’, in Karl Rahner et al (eds), Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopaedia of Theology, Vol. Six. Scandal-Zionism (New York: Herder and Herder; London: Burns and Oates, 1970), pp. 275–81). 5 On the forgotten sociality of the Earth community, see Kevin Hart ‘Forgotten Sociality’ under the heading ‘Personal Well-being and Social Conscience’, in Frank Brennan (ed.), Discerning the Australian Social Conscience: from the Jesuit Lenten Series (Richmond, Vic: Jesuit Publications, 1999). On ‘being toward the other’, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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in a way that is more than figurative, a eucalypt may be at once cross and Christ. A bat interrupting the night sky may be Spirit. When rosellas screech in my back yard, theirs may be the voice of Sophia (Divine or Woman Wisdom). The material interval between my life partner and myself, between our skins, as we embrace may be a fleshly grace by which each one cherishes the other as other. It is to be open to the possibility that, when I put my hand to the soil in the front yard, the otherness of Earth reaches toward me. These are mutually transcendent moments in which, beyond the self-projections I impose on them, I may encounter an Earthly otherness, that is perhaps also of God. For ecofeminist theologian, Ivone Gebara,6 the experiential basis of transcendence is an ‘affirmation that words cannot fully express what we understand and live out’. Human experiences of difference, otherness, complexity and incomprehensibility give rise to a variety of understandings of transcendence: a notion of transcendence that is, to borrow from Irigaray (on sexual difference), ‘not one’. Traditionally, we think of transcendence within a number of frameworks – cosmological, ontological, epistemological, phenomenological, and mathematical – as describing something or someone outside, and perhaps the cause (or creator), of the physical cosmos; having a higher, or more perfect, form of existence than other beings; beyond human capacities to know and experience; and in excess of what can be codified in human systems of symbols.7 Such understandings of transcendence have been implicated in a turning away from Earth, and a devaluing of the material cosmos as imperfect, partial and secondary, and, concomitantly, available to the probes of human knowledge, experience and systematic representation. As Carolyn Merchant8 ably shows, an anti-woman sexualisation of Earth underwrites this devaluing construction of Earth as outside transcendence and ‘ripe’ for human knowing. However, rather than dismissing the notion of transcendence altogether, I want to suggest that the beyond-ness of transcendence can be rethought not (or not only) as outside matter, but as an otherness within (or proper to) the matter of Earth. I have suggested elsewhere that from an ecological perspective it might be timely to hold in abeyance our images and ideas of God and to turn toward the material otherness of an earth, and indeed a cosmic, community of others of which we are already part in ways that we can only know partially at best.9 Accompanying this turn is a kind of stance of unknowing with respect to earth, cosmos, and God, akin 6 Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), p. 153. 7 Gendreau, ‘Transcendence’, in Carson and Cerrito (eds), The New Catholic Encyclopaedia, pp. 141–2. 8 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, originally published 1980; republished with new preface (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), pp. 168–72. 9 Anne Elvey, ‘Leaf litter: Thinking the divine from the perspective of Earth’, in Kathleen McPhillips (ed.), What’s God got to do with it?: Essays from a one day conference exploring the challenges facing feminism, theology and the conceptions of women and the divine in the new millennium,’ 2 August 1999, Sydney University, Humanities Transdisciplinary Research group (UWS Hawkesbury, University of Western Sydney, 2000); Mellor, Feminism and Ecology, p. 186.

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to a negative theology. It is both an ethical and a strategic stance that is not to deny God, or the possibility of God, but to affirm the deep material otherness of an Earth community which calls us to responsibility before the ongoing losses – other-thanhuman and human – that are the tragic reality of our here and now. In an evocative poem entitled ‘If There Is No God’, Ellen Bass10 calls us to act as if there is no God to save us, and so to love passionately that which is before us, to be engaged witnesses to the destruction and the wonder and the healing or ‘salvation’ of the Earth and so ourselves. We can ask if this is enough. Against the webs of destruction within which we are already entwined and in which we continue to weave ourselves, what might empower such an engagement if not God or at least grace? Can we re-imagine such grace as a transformative eruption from the otherness within the deep material ground of the Earth community? The Matter of Earth It is morning in the Barmah forest. I am on Yorta Yorta land for a weekend of crosscultural reflection. I have heard of the way local non-Indigenous graziers let cattle into the forest, sometimes even tearing down fences around sites of significance to the Yorta Yorta. This morning I see where the cattle have walked, their heavy hooves compacting the soil and introducing weeds. In the early morning light two kangaroos feed on the grasses in their tracks. Since the 1840s the Yorta Yorta people have been making official claim to Australian governments for their land.11 In recent years they have made a native title claim, lodging appeal after appeal to higher courts as each claim is rejected. The story of these court cases and the treatment of elders giving evidence sounds like the way in which victims giving evidence are treated in sexual abuse cases. They are unable to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that they have maintained their traditional customs and beliefs. It is as if only non-Aboriginal cultures are allowed to change over time. Lately the Yorta Yorta have reached an agreement with the Victorian state government allowing Yorta Yorta representation on a management committee which can offer advice to government on the management of traditional Yorta Yorta lands and waterways now deemed crown land in Victoria.12 Here in the Barmah forest, the matter of earth is the matter of the way river banks are washed away in the wake of speeding leisure boats, of the way a people claim connection with and responsibility for their land, of the way plants and animals are nourished, of the ways in which micro-organisms and worms interact with soil and leaf litter to renew the earth, of the way cattle make this difficult.

10 Ellen Bass, ‘If There Is No God’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. xxix, nos 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2001): 194–5. 11 For a description of the historical background to Yorta Yorta claims to land see Wayne Atkinson, ‘Yorta Yorta Struggle for Justice Continues’, http://users.mcmedia.com.au/~yorta/ wayne.html (Accessed 2 Septembetr 2004). See also Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, ‘“Tradition and Authenticity”: The Yorta Yorta Case’, http:// www.aiatsis.gove.au/rsch/ntru/new_and_notes/yorta_yorta/yorta_yorta.htm (Accessed 2 September 2004). 12 Fergus Shiel, ‘Yorta Yorta win historic deal’, The Age, 1 May 2004. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/30/1083224579722.html?from=storyrhs&onecli ck=true (Accessed 2 September 2004).

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Within a capitalist colonialist framework, Yorta Yorta claims to country and the related claims to integrity of the diverse, more than human, Barmah forest community are subordinated to the claims of cattle graziers, tourist industries, state government authorities and numerous others. Underlying this subordination is a colonizing logic in which indigenous peoples, land, Earth, animals, plants, women and bodies are identified and constructed as other with respect to a western (mostly) male elite whose (supposed) interests receive precedence in economic and political life.13 There are three key lies on which this construction depends. The first is a denial or dismissal of human dependence on and interdependence with the Earth community which sustains human life and with which humans are already interconnected. The second is a denial of plurality and difference, within the Earth community, among humans, even among human elites. The plurality of the Earth community can be thought to span not only its multitude of different constituents, animal and plant, organic and inorganic, of species and forms of life, but also its myriad interrelationships, that bring together individuals or groups of humans or other animals with particular places and habitats. These interrelationships describe cooperation and sometimes competition between different constituents of the Earth community as they endeavour to flourish in their place. There is also the vast relationality of destruction and loss, for example, through processes of extinction and colonisation, creating fissures in and new relationships between peoples and lands, animals and ecosystems, seas and skies. The third is the belief that human mastery of Earth has entirely predictable and controllable outcomes. Rather, with regard to human control of Earth’s processes, Earth is at most only partially predictable. Moreover, Earth, as a vast community of human and other-than-human constituents, can resist human mastery. This can be seen operating in various ways: for example, at the level of an individual human member of the Earth community, where the unconscious resists human mastery; at the level of human communities, where those who are oppressed resist their oppressors; and at the level of local ecosystems, where rare native grasses sprout between paddock fences and major roads. There are several possible ways of understanding transcendence in relation to these currently vexed interrelationships between humans and the Earth community of which we are part. Here, I suggest three: vertical, horizontal and material. When we construct Earth as other – for example, as no more than an object knowable by western science and available for our economic use – we adopt a ‘transcendent’ stance with respect to Earth, a vertical stance in which we act as if we exist over and beyond (or above) the exigencies of the interdependence of the entire Earth community. In so doing, we fail to respect the otherness of Earth as a subject (or plurality of subjects) in its own right, within which our own subjectivity exists, and by which we continue to be nourished and shaped. For Irigaray,14 the parallel western failure to respect the otherness of individual women by constructing woman as the other of man (that is, as not man and nothing else), serves to exclude woman, and women, from a horizontal transcendence, that is from a proper respect for and 13 Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, pp. 41–4. 14 Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London and New York: Continuum, 2002).

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engagement with woman’s difference from man.15 By analogy, the failure to respect the plural otherness of the Earth community by constructing Earth as other serves to exclude Earth from transcendence. This horizontal transcendence calls forth from Earth’s human constituents an openness to the Earth community in all its complex difference from and continuity with, humankind. This openness is the basis for an affirmation of a material transcendence, which is not strictly vertical or horizontal, but regarding which grass, springing up in destructive cattle tracks and becoming sustenance for two kangaroos one morning in the Barmah forest, is more than a weedy symbol of multiple colonisations of people and land. What are the contours of this more than? The Matter of Air Today the wind blows where it pleases (cf. John 3:8). Yesterday I attended a seminar on interspecies communication. Today I am listening for birdsong, but hear instead the soft insistent percussion of leaves, the clang of flag poles, the tap-dance of an aluminium container bouncing down Sydney Road. A few drops of not quite rain touch my cheeks. The matter of air batters my senses with more than the usual unconscious breathing in and out that oxygenates my blood and helps to keep me alive.

Luce Irigaray writes of the matter of air as that which makes communication possible. Air carries the sound of the voice from the mouth of one to the ear of the other. Air fills the space between us, even as we reach out to touch one another. Air is the material interval (or space) between lovers. For Irigaray, in order to make possible an honouring and bringing to birth of an authentic sexual difference between women and men, we must preserve this space. It matters that this space is material, is air and not nothing. Air is the forgotten matrix of our being, giving space to a particular kind of transcendence between two others, the transcendence of a loving restraint which allows the other to be other at the same time as approaching the other with a tactful speech which calls forth a self-transcendence in the one and the other.16 This speech is only possible through the material medium of air; the caress is only fecund because it is matter engaging with matter. The mutual self-transcendence of lovers, which respects the transcendence each of the other, is not a transcendence of matter but an enmattered transcendence, which is not to be reduced to a corporeal or material immanence without difference.17

15 On the exclusion of the feminine and nature from transcendence, see Elizabeth Johnson, Women, Earth and Creator Spirit (New York/Mahwah, Paulist, 1993), p. 18 and Anne Primavesi, From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 144–6; cf. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. by Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–5, on the forgetting of the transcendence of the mother. 16 Irigaray, The Way of Love. 17 Cf David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 225–60.

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In a similar way, the matter of air is a medium for a material engagement between many Earth (and cosmic) others, connecting humans and other animals to myriad others across space and time. As we breathe in the exhaled breath of human and more than human others, we breathe in the matter of ancient stars, of dying forests, and of burning fuel extracted from fossils set down long ago. We inhale a material otherness that becomes part of us, shaping us in ways we can only know partially at best, and bringing us into a corporeal intimacy with a more than human world, the fate of which we share through this exchange of breath. This intimate material shaping and sharing, which is more than we can say of it, is one of the contours of our engagement with an enmattered transcendence. The Matter of Fire It is evening in summer. The warm air carries the smell of fire. Each summer in Australia, as bushfires take hold in the grasslands and forests of the country, we see the frightening material otherness of fire. Some plants have evolved here to use fire to germinate their seeds. Fire transforms matter into other matter, burning, lighting, releasing energy, creating greenhouse gases, warming.

If, through the exchange of breath, air puts us in contact with the material transcendence of Earth others in a particular way, the matter-transforming capacity of fire reveals another aspect of this transcendence. Irigaray18 invokes the fiery transcendence of the sun to call into question the notion that the transcendent is far away. Rather, the distant sun with its fiery gases is all around us in the light, which allows us to see, and by which plants catalyse their food. Moreover, the transcendent quality of the fire that is the sun rests in its capacity, like the burning bush of Exodus, to survive its own conflagration, if not indefinitely then at any moment. The sun’s material transcendence, then, lies in the particularity of the transforming capacity of a fire that at any moment does not consume itself, and which approaches us as enabling and sustaining light that is itself material. In this context of the sun’s transcendence, Irigaray19 reads passion and death as akin to fire. She suggests that a man’s passion for a woman might be a spark of recognition of the otherness of woman, of woman in herself. This passion is not self-consuming but, like the light shed by the sun, is (in part at least) illuminative and nourishing of the proper otherness of woman. Moreover, that which in woman survives the patriarchal appropriation of her, the denial of her identity, is also like the solar fire that at any moment is not consumed. The material agency and transcendence of fire, however, exceeds the metaphoric associations that Irigaray makes. In a wonderfully lucid environmental history of the mountain ash in Victoria, Tom Griffiths20 tells the story of the fires of Friday 13 18 Luce Irigaray Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, trans. by Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 19 Ibid., pp. 42–9. 20 Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 129–49.

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January 1939.21 He writes of the massive sweep of fires affecting vast areas of the state and compiles a list of lives lost, people left homeless, transport infrastructures and public buildings damaged or destroyed. He says: ‘The arithmetic of disaster, impressive as it was, hardly captured the enormity of the experience.’22 Beside this tally is another ‘catalogue of disaster’ in the recollections of survivors, from ‘the strange behaviour of matches’ both before and after the fire, to the ‘thick pall of smoke that turned day into night’, to ash that fell as far away as New Zealand, to stories of individual survival and loss.23 In the Royal Commission into the fire, Griffiths24 reads a compelling story of relationship between land, people and fire. It has become accepted that Indigenous Australians have used fire to manage the land in particular ways and that fire has become part of the natural processes of regeneration of forests in Australia.25 In the testimony of survivors,26 Griffiths identifies a relationship to fire and land of some rural non-Indigenous Australians that has resonance with that of Indigenous Australians. While the 1939 fires were largely the product of human mismanagement, they also called forth something ‘elemental’ about the relationship between people and land. In the deliberations of the Royal Commission on the fires, it emerged that fire seemed ‘so much a part of the Australian landscape and character that it could never be eliminated or suppressed’.27 While the impetus resurfaced then and remains today to use, and perhaps control, fire in rural areas, a sense emerges in Griffiths’ narrative that fire itself is part of the land shaping the people. Through human management, mismanagement, ignorance and neglect of fire, human agency interplays with a more than human natural ‘predisposition’ toward fire found in the ash forests. This complex interplay of human and more than human agencies calls into question a clear splitting of culture from nature. In an Australian context, fire ‘transcends’ human agency. Fire also impacts other animals whose lives are interdependent – both to their detriment and their flourishing – with Victoria’s ash forests.28 Fire mediates a material transcendence operative through the agency of land in shaping both human and more than human histories. In a postcolonial context, moreover, where tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships to land remain, Griffiths’ suggestion that fire shows a way the land acts on its inhabitants, sometimes beyond their own capacities for agency, finds resonance in the words of Australian poet John Anderson:29

21 I am grateful to my good friend Ruth Harrison, who herself lives in a fire-prone area of Victorian ash forest, for reminding me of Griffith’s work. 22 Griffiths, Forests of Ash, p. 134. 23 Ibid., pp. 134–5. 24 Ibid., pp. 136–42. 25 Marcia Langton, Burning Questions: emerging environmental issues for indigenous peoples in northern Australia (Darwin: Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University, 1998), pp. 38–58. 26 Griffiths, Forests of Ash, p. 140. 27 Ibid., pp. 136–7. 28 Ibid., pp. 144–5. 29 John Anderson, The forest set out like the night (North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 1995), p. 29.

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The country is making something different of all of us.

The Matter of Water Each evening in Melbourne, even as we come into winter, during the ABC News there is a report on the state of our water catchments. Yesterday a farmer spoke with me about cracks a meter deep in the dry soil of her land. Here the matter of water is a matter of absence, of drought, and of the hope of drought broken. But it is also a matter of excess, of flood, of ground too dry to soak in the sudden flows of rain when they come. It is, too, a matter of city creeks where car bodies are dumped, of industrial waste flowing into streams, and of sewerage. It is matter of people who plant and weed and test the water quality to keep alive city waterways. It is a matter of seas calm and surging, of the moon pulling the tides, of countries where there is no clean drinking water, of land where salt rises because of over-irrigation, of water diverted to drive turbines to produce electricity. Of water tables falling or rising. Of ice melting. Of islands perhaps being engulfed. Of bodies which are mostly water.

Greta Gaard30 describes a dichotomy between pure water and waste water. This split is an example of what Val Plumwood31 calls a hyper-separation, that is, a dualism in which the difference between two terms is rendered in an exclusive and oppositional mode. For example, woman is not man; nature is that which is excluded from culture; wilderness is the polar opposite of civilisation. Gaard sets the human need for clean drinking water (pure water) against the continuing use of water for the disposal of human waste, sewerage (waste water). She finds these dualistic and contradictory uses of water to be enmeshed in the gendered framework of environmental sexism, racism and classism, in which access to water and energy and the effects of water pollution are unevenly distributed. There is an ‘assumption that energy can be continuously extracted from nature – from water, from poor people, from people of colour, from women – without giving back anything of sustenance’.32 Water, which has in effect been excluded from our economic accounting, suggests a different economic flow that accounts for the interplay of the death-giving and life-sustaining capacities of water itself and our treatment of it.33 In another vein, Catherine Keller34 considers our cultural understandings of the interplay of the death-giving and life-sustaining capacities of water when she considers biblical and later interpretations of the primeval waters of Genesis 1:1–2: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void (tohu va bohu) and darkness covered the face of the deep (tehom), while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (Gen 1:1–2; NRSV) 30 Greta Gaard, ‘Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach’, Organization and Environment 14, 2 (June 2001): 157–60. 31 See Plumwood, Environmental Culture. 32 Gaard, ‘Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach’, p. 167. 33 Ibid., pp. 168–9. 34 Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).

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Keller coins a term ‘tehomophobia’, to describe the fear of the deep. The deep is for Keller the matter of possibilities and processes which make up the tehom of Genesis 1:2, the inchoate matter existing prior to creation. Fear of this tehom is expressed not only in accounts of creation from nothing which deny a materiality co-existent with originary spirit, but also in our psychological failures to accept the depths in our selves that call forth risky ethical and loving relationships with others. Strongly critiquing a theological tradition of creation from nothing, Keller writes: At the very site of its originative nonorigin, the flow of flows, the ocean of springs, got linguistically frozen. God’s omnipotence was accordingly shored up to replace human responsibility for the world, while Christian morality was left to monitor bodily openings and effluvia.35

There is a reminder here of a split between the pure water of (pre-?)creation (frozen in a certain theological rhetoric) and the waste water of bodily openings and effluvia. Against this splitting, Keller affirms a deep materiality from which creation emerges: ‘the nova creatio ex profundis’.36 This is an affirmation, too, of the deep matter of leaky bodies as engaged sites of divine creativity. Is this deep matter divine? Does it precede the divine, bringing forth God as creator? Does it at the same time require ‘our entire participation’ – deep calling to deep in the roar of waters? Keller’s engaged reflection on Genesis 1:2 concludes: ‘In beginning: a plurisingularity of universe, earth echoing chaos, dark deep vibrating with spirit, creates.’37 Here transcendence can be figured not as the quality of otherness of one who shapes from nothing, but as the inherence of the originary deep chaos – tohu va bohu – in matter. Keller’s theological reflections on Genesis 1:2 have a style of mysticism which has traditionally been associated with notions of transcendence. In passing, however, Keller38 calls into question a mystical/activist binarisation and so suggests an opening for reading an ecofeminist material transcendence not so much as some sort of nature mysticism but rather as a deeply ecological feminist activism. The Matter of God Ecofeminist activists can be rightly suspicious of any appeal to a kind of transcendence that would turn the gaze away from the immanence of the Earth community and the immediacy of its claims on us. The Macquarie Dictionary defines the theological use of the word ‘transcendent’ to mean ‘being beyond matter, and having a continuing existence therefore outside the created world’. A definition of the transcendent as ‘beyond matter’ can suggest a hyperseparation of the concepts of immanence and transcendence around the binarisation of the concepts of matter and spirit.

35 36 37 38

Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 238. Ibid., p. 238; see also Nancy, Being Singular Plural. Keller, The Face of the Deep, p. 214.

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Anne Primavesi39 argues that the exclusion of the feminine and nature from transcendence corresponds with the patriarchalisation of God and a ‘de-souling’ of women and nature. Within this nexus, where women and nature are associated with ‘soulless’ matter, man – and by extension humankind – has to go outside nature (the not-God) to encounter God. Interestingly, while the Macquarie Dictionary definition of transcendence has some focus (albeit a negative one) on matter and creation, the same dictionary gives an anthropocentric (and androcentric) edge to the theological use of the word ‘immanent’ as ‘of or pertaining to the continuing presence of God among His people and in each individual believer’.40 Such an understanding of male divine immanence as situated in the human sphere serves to reinforce the patriarchal assimilation of woman and nature to supposedly ‘soulless’ matter. Against an overvaluation of transcendence which sets the divine above and outside nature, however, one common ecofeminist response is to stress divine immanence (or continuing presence) in nature. But feminist physicist Elisabetta Donini41 instead calls into question a transcendence/immanence dualism, by sketching the contours of a ‘radical immanence’ rooted in the materiality of Earth life. Her description of immanence as radical refers to an orientation to the other (indeed many others) – human and more than human – in interrelationship with whom one’s subjectivity is formed. That is, radical (or rooted) immanence describes that complex presence to ourselves as female subjects whose emerging subjectivity is rooted in, and shaped by, the networks of human and more than human relationships of which we are part. These interrelationships bind us ethically, so that a perspective of radical immanence is ‘a commitment to concrete relations between diverse women and men’, and by extension with more than human others.42 For Donini, difference and diversity are constitutive of both self and other. The immanent engagement with diverse others by which we becomes ourselves has, in its very focus on difference, a quality of transcendence. This is particularly so, because ‘those dynamic relations which connect [the subject] to the environment of which she or he is part’ bring, to any interaction with the other, characteristics of both partiality and excess.43 For example, in our attempts to know, aid or enter into loving relationship with the other (or others), our knowledge of both self and other is incomplete, and relationships between us have aspects which exceed what we can say of them. As Irigaray’s work suggests, loving engagement with these aspects of partiality and excess within relationships between self and other is essential to our becoming woman (in the context of an authentic sexual difference) and, I would add, to our becoming human (in the context of a diverse Earth community within which we are materially rooted). 39 Primavesi, From Apocalypse to Genesis, pp. 139–51. 40 Arthur Delbridge. et al (eds), The Macquarie Dictionary, revised edition NSW: Macquarie Library, 1985), p. 871. 41 Elisabetta Donini, ‘Women and the Politics of Diversity: a Perspective Immanence’, in Elizabeth Green and Mary Grey (eds), Ökofeminismus und Ecofeminism and Theology/Écoféminisme et Théologie (Kampen; Kok Pharos House; Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1994). 42 Ibid., p. 65. 43 Ibid., p. 64.

(Dee Why, of Radical Theologie/ Publishing

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Within a holistic framework, Rosemary Radford Ruether affirms the immanence of God in the world in such a way that openness to God is openness to a becoming that is oriented toward and actively works to bring to birth ‘new communities of mutual flourishing’.44 For Ruether, the divine matrix in which we ‘live and move and have our being’ is both immanent and transcendent (Acts 17:28). An understanding of ‘immanent transcendence and transcendent immanence’ is necessary for an ecofeminist theology of liberation.45 While a sense of God immanent within the (Earth) community places God within the struggles for human and more than human liberation, the concomitant possibility of a God who transcends (and is therefore free of) present oppressive structures can empower resistance to just those structures. A nuanced affirmation of a divine immanence that does not define the divine as nature, world or cosmos, or vice versa, but which affirms the presence of the divine both in and embracing the world appeals to a kind of panentheism, of which Elizabeth Johnson writes: Distinct from classical theism which separates God and the world, and also different from pantheism which merges God and the world, panentheism holds that the universe, both matter and spirit, is encompassed by the Matrix of the living God in an encircling that generates freedom, self-transcendence, and the future, all in the context of the interconnected whole.

Johnson46 goes on to say: ‘The relationship created by this mutual indwelling, while non-hierarchical and reciprocal, is not strictly symmetrical, for the world is dependent on God in a way that God is not on the world.’ There is a question whether this invocation of an asymmetry, which Ruether also describes in a different way in terms of freedom, tends to return us to a problematic framework which sets the divine beyond or outside the world. In a slightly different panentheist mode, Sallie McFague describes the world as the body of God. Negotiating the interplay between transcendence and immanence expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity,47 McFague suggests that we reimage Trinity as face, body, spirit. Each of these is a biblically-based notion: the face of God as a space of transcendence; the body of Christ as the incarnate divine presence; and the Spirit as mediator, both immanent and transcendent. I am taken by the materiality of the images of face and body, but question the ascription of transcendence to one and immanence to the other, and ask further: to sustain a focus on the material why not say instead: face, body, breath?48

44 Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘The God of Possibilities: Immanence and Transcendence Rethought’, The Brighter Side of Faith: Concilium: International Journal for Theology, no. 4 (2000): 45–54. 45 Ibid., p. 50. 46 Ibid., p. 43. 47 Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 191–5. 48 As Irigaray (1999 and 2002) points out, breath or air is the medium of relationship with the other.

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In a context where a material interconnectedness and interdependence between the plural constituents of the Earth community is affirmed, relationship becomes focal for an ecofeminist theology and spirituality. Ivone Gebara49 writes of ‘relatedness as a language and experience of the divine’. Donini describes ‘dynamic relations’ and a pluralist friendship which accounts for the diversity that constitutes the subjectivity of the other while Johnson writes of kinship and McFague appeals to the sense of touch as a mode of already being interconnected with Earth others. Anne Primavesi50 writes: ‘ ... if we take transcendence seriously, we acknowledge our interdependence with all the created world related to God in love, and believe that each created being has intrinsic value since it shares a relationship with God in its own way.’ In a more recent work she describes a ‘coevolving relationality’. Further, while Irigaray focuses on human sexual difference, her insight that relationships between women and men must respect the otherness of each one – if woman is to become herself woman and not the other of man – is pertinent here. Importantly, for Irigaray the relationship between self and other exists materially within and between the one and the other. In giving space to the authentic transcendence of each one, this material relationship – of which the distinctive medium is air – gives space to a rebuilding of the world. In this rebuilding, earth and sky, past and future interconnect and survive as properly themselves within the co-becoming of an authentic sexual difference. At first reading, Irigaray’s continual return to matters of sexual difference may appear anthropocentric. However, her subtle understanding of the embeddedness of human sexual difference within the matter of the world and the attention she gives to the possibility of a corporeal, relational becoming, that is not yet, together open a space for reading sexual difference otherwise. Sexual difference not only expresses the interconnected diversity of the Earth community, but also mediates the becoming of that community by incarnating in relationships between women and men a deep respect for the plural otherness of the wider Earth (and cosmic) community. An ecofeminist preference for relationality as theology implies – as lovers come to know – that the immanence of interconnectedness is already infused with the transcendence of the one and the other, of many others. Is this infusion a property of matter per se or of matter coming to be itself matter and not the other of spirit? To parallel Irigaray’s51 appeal to divine women: is this infusion a ‘becoming divine’ of matter, but not in any way that we can know or predict or circumscribe by theologies orthodox or otherwise? Toward an Ecofeminist Material Transcendence Two socialist ecofeminists, Mary Mellor and Val Plumwood, coming from slightly different standpoints, offer materialist perspectives that have interesting

49 Gebara, Longing for Running Water, pp. 102–9. 50 Primavesi, From Apocalypse to Genesis, p. 152. 51 Luce Irigaray, Divine Women, trans. by Stephen Muecke, Local Consumption Paper 8 (Sydney: Local Consumption, 1986).

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implications for a ‘becoming divine’ of matter. Mellor52 eschews a spiritualisation of matter and situates any revelatory experience of ecological holism firmly in the materiality of human consciousness. Writing of a deep materialism, Mellor critically brings together feminist, deep ecological, and Marxist insights in a view of humannature interaction that is alert to both the plurality of women’s experiences and the interlinked oppressions of nature and of those humans subordinated on the basis of race, class, gender and sex, ethnicity, ability and so on. Her approach is politically engaged and open to the otherness of relationships between human and other-thanhuman nature – relationships which are necessarily both culturally constructed and more than cultural. Against the notion that humans transcend nature, Mellor writes of ‘hu(man)ity’s immanence’ with respect to nature.53 For Mellor this immanence implies that, for humans, ‘any knowledge about the natural world is always partial’. Implying a ‘radical uncertainty’, an affirmation of this partiality ‘should be the starting point of all other knowledges’. In proposing a deep materialism that affirms ‘human immanence’ with respect to nature, Mellor also affirms a kind of material transcendence in which nature always precedes and exceeds anything that humankind can know of it. In a different but related vein, Plumwood writes of ‘a materialist spirituality of place’. Calling into question the way in which Christian critiques of consumerism sometimes focus negatively on materialism as ‘the culprit’, Plumwood54 argues that this negative evaluation coheres with a binarisation of the categories of spirit/matter; spirituality/materiality; mind/body and so on that has also infected Christian thought. Instead she argues that: ... there is an important sense in which what we need is more materialism, not less, a better awareness of ourselves as materially embodied beings in a material universe in which we are all material (e.g. food) for one another, and also organised material beings rather than ‘mere matter’ in its unorganised state.55

Plumwood suggests that, rather than looking for a separate spiritual life beyond death, we can understand spirit to be ‘a certain mode of organisation of a material body, unable to exist separately from it’.56 However, to describe spirit as a ‘mode of organisation of a material body’ may be insufficient for a thinking of material transcendence.57 My concern is that the 52 Mellor, Feminism and Ecology. 53 Mellor writes hu(man)ity rather than humanity to signify the culturally constructed gendered split between men and women that infects at least western understandings of humanity. See Mary Mellor, ‘Feminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist Perspective’, papers from a conference Environmental Justice: Global Ethics for the 21st Century, October 1–3, 1997, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, http:// www.arbld.unimelb.edu.au/envjust/papers/allpapers/mellor/home.htm (Accessed 27 August 2004). 54 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, p. 222. 55 Ibid., p. 223. 56 Ibid., p. 223. 57 Within Plumwood’s materialist spirituality, spirit – as a mode of material organization of the corporeal – need not be restricted to human bodies. See Plumwood, Environmental

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notion of organization is somewhat too structuralist, suggesting that the aspect, or inherence, of matter sometimes called ‘spirit’ can be known systematically. Perhaps what we need is a complexification of the notion of organization modified by the idea from contemporary physics, for example, that a subatomic materiality can only be understood as organized in a way that is always already radically uncertain and beyond our capacity to observe or describe it. This aspect of radical uncertainty finds a particular resonance in Keller’s sense of the chaotic depths of matter. We can open ourselves to these chaotic material depths in the particularity of the communities, places and times in which we live, and in our relationships to the specific human and more than human members of the Earth communities and their places (which may be far off from ours) that sustain us. Plumwood’s materialist spirituality affirms that the matter of particular places has agency with respect to human lives. Situated in and between specific places, the webs of material connections, into which we are woven by virtue of our dependence on and interdependence with many Earth others, offer multiple sources of revelation of the chaotic deep within the matter that shapes our subjectivities and sustains us. Through affective and critical engagements in place, we also come to know ourselves more deeply as inextricably interconnected with, and shaping the subjectivities and the survival chances of, many others.58 This human engagement in the shaping of human and more than human subjectivities and survival parallels the engagement of men in shaping the subjectivities and survival of women under patriarchy. In both cases, the issue of respect for the depths of the other’s otherness and agency, as necessary for survival, is also an issue of the inclusion of woman and matter in the transcendent. Considering Irigaray’s subtle critique of the absence of women from the transcendent and the need for a divine in the feminine, if woman is to be or become fully herself as woman, AnnMarie Priest explains: In writing woman as God, Irigaray suggests that God is also woman: not that God is sympathetic to woman or has, somehow, a female identity, but that God is (also) that Culture. But perhaps we need to understand spirit as deeply engaged not only in the matter of bodies (human or otherwise), but in all matter. Such an understanding of matter and spirit can be drawn from some Christian theologies; for example, Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner writes that spirit ‘is a form of matter which is subsistent in itself’. The spirit is not matter but is bound to matter. Spirit is, moreover, ‘the form of matter’. Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. by William Dych (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 293, 296, 322, 380, italics added. See further, John Honner, ‘Unity-in-difference: Karl Rahner and Niels Bohr’, Theological Studies, vol. 46, no. 3 (1985): 480–506 and Michael Petty, A Faith that Loves the Earth: The Ecological Theology of Karl Rahner (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996). A critical ecofeminist exploration of the work of Rahner is, however, beyond the scope of this essay. 58 In relation to this web of contingencies, see also Ursula Goodenough, ‘Vertical and Horizontal Transcendence’, Zygon, 36, 1 (March 2001): 21–31, on horizontal and vertical transcendence. Cf. Donald Crosby, ‘Transcendence and Immanence in a Religion of Nature’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 24, 3 (September 2003): 245–59 and Roger Gottlieb, ‘The Transcendence of Justice and the Justice of Transcendence: Mysticism, Deep Ecology, and Political Life’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 67, 1 (1999): 149–66.

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which is suppressed, appropriated, denied, or simply domesticated by a patriarchal symbolic order. As such, God in God’s radical alterity, like woman in hers, possesses the explosive potential of the feminine: to enable new words to be spoken, new meanings to emerge, and new possibilities to be conceptualized for both human subjectivity (female and male) and the divine. As an apophatic mystic of ‘woman’, then, Irigaray sheds light on the ‘womanliness’ of God, suggesting that God is both a model and an agent for the disruption of patriarchy and the creation of a feminine subjectivity.59

I suggest that as an excluded other in an anthropocentric framework (which is also usually androcentric), matter could be viewed similarly. In her work on the deep, Keller asks: ‘But would we call the ocean “God”?’ In the terms of this essay, my response is that I would and would not call ocean or earth, air or sun, ‘God’. On the one hand, in wanting to suspend the question of God in favour of an orientation toward the otherness of the material and its claims upon us, I would not identify matter and God. On the other hand, in terms of the claims of the forgotten otherness of a materiality which is both ours (as human beings embodied and embedded within the dense and interconnected matter of earth and cosmos) and more than ours (for we are only one small part of the plural singular of the universe), I would identify matter and God. God is matter insofar as (paraphrasing Priest): God in God’s radical alterity, like matter in its, possesses the explosive potential of the material: to enable new words to be spoken, new meanings to emerge, and new possibilities to be conceptualized for both human subjectivity (as part of the plural subjectivities of earth and cosmos) and the divine – and specifically, to open human subjectivities to the claim of these other singular plural subjects which precede and exceed the human. What, then, if our metaphors for God are understood as referring first to a material transcendence that is already embodied, enfleshed, enmattered in the stuff of earth, of human sexuality and reproduction, of natality and mortality, of worms and bats, eucalypts and stars, of the otherness of a cosmic community in which grace grows in ground, in which the breath between two lovers is an interval of grace, in which the animal looks at me with the eyes of God, in which the plants I eat are the stuff of the hospitality of Earth, the for the other-ness by which we are constituted one for the other as Earth beings? From an ecofeminist perspective, to affirm a material transcendence in which our mutual alterity is constituted as for the other is to stand first before all the others – human and more than human – who have given themselves willingly and unwillingly for us. Conclusion In terms of the possibility of a deep political and ethical engagement, I have endeavoured to invoke here the possibility of an ecofeminist material transcendence. With regard to the matter of Earth, I suggest that as matrix of life, Earth has been excluded from transcendence. But the multiplicity of Earth points to a type of 59 Ann-Marie Priest, ‘Woman as God, God as Woman: Mysticism, Negative Theology and Luce Irigaray’, The Journal of Religion, 83, 1 (January 2003): 3–4.

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material transcendence in which a complex interplay of agencies always exceeds Earth’s individual constituents and indeed Earth itself in its plural singularity. The matter of air points to the underlying materiality of our language and relationships, and the enmattered transcendence that inheres in each. The matter of fire, here, indicates the way in which the materiality of nature transcends the human, not only in terms of the limits of human control over nature, but also in terms of the agency of nature in shaping human and more than human embeddedness in place. The matter of water describes a material transcendence at work both in the chaotic depths of matter and in an activist ecofeminism that accounts for human dependence on and responsibility for water, earth, air and fire. Our relationships of interdependence with, and responsibility for, Earth others then become the fragile and necessary basis for any ecofeminist consideration of the matter of God.

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Chapter 5

Who’s Been Reading MY Bible? Post-structuralist Hermeneutics and Sacred Text Janet Wootton

Are You What You Read? Once upon a time, a little girl named Goldilocks was walking through the forest, and she came upon the home of a family of bears: Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear and Baby Bear. Goldilocks tried out the porridge, the chair and then the bed of Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear and Baby Bear in turn. It was dangerous enough to be wandering through this territory, filled with the accoutrements of wild beasts, but Goldilocks did not realize the full implications of the situation. ‘Who’s been eating MY porridge?’ roars Daddy Bear and Mummy Bear, but Baby Bear suffers most all: his porridge is eaten all up, his chair is broken and his bed – well, it is still occupied. That roar of outraged possession, in response to anything that threatens the closed life of this cosy little family, re-echoes against generations of liberation, feminist and post-structural readings. All those Daddy Bears feeling the spurious need to protect all the Mummy Bears and Baby Bears from these intruders; Mummy Bear and Baby Bear in fear of the disruption of their nice, comfortable life of porridge-eating and sleeping. Who’s been reading MY Bible, endangering MY values . . . ? Worst of all, the reader is ‘Goldilocks’, the little girl, who should be combing her golden locks in preparation for a life of enriching submission. Instead, Goldilocks is still in there, testing the temperature of the porridge and trying out the furniture for size, and maybe breaking a few things. I was brought up on fairytales like these, in which naughty little girls got into trouble with wild animals, young women entered happiness ever after by marrying the handsome prince, and old women were wicked stepmothers or witches. My childhood reading followed a pattern which I recognize in analyses such as that of Elizabeth Segel.1 From the Victorian era when children’s reading was first divided into boys’ and girls’ books, she charts the way in which the education system consciously biased children’s reading. Because girls read boys’ books, but boys would not read 1 Elizabeth Segel, ‘As the Twig is Bent: Gender and Childhood Reading’, in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (eds), Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 165–86.

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girls’ books. Schools were advised to read only boys’ books in class, and to stock their libraries with a ratio of 3 to 2 boys’ to girls’ books. Segel recalls this terrible institutional bias with the additional warning that reading habits are set in childhood. The article is entitled, ‘As the Twig is Bent’. And the twig is bent further by reading throughout the education system and grows into the twisted tree of the literary canon, which itself branches out into film, TV drama, soaps and narrative computer games. Patrocinio P. Schweickart, writing in the same volume,2 notes the dreadful fact that the 1977 canon of major American writers did not contain a single woman novelist, and this was by no means untypical of the time. A feminist reader cannot choose to read only non-patriarchal literature. A feminist cannot simply refuse to read patriarchal texts, for they are everywhere . . . In fact, by the time she becomes a feminist critic a woman has already read numerous male texts . . . She has introjected not only androcentric texts, but also androcentric reading strategies and values. By the time she becomes a feminist, the bifurcated response characteristic of immasculation has become second nature to her. The feminist story stresses that patriarchal constructs have objective as well as subjective reality; they are inside and outside of the text, inside and outside of the reader.

‘Immasculation’ is what happens when a woman reads a patriarchal text. Schweickart quotes Lee Edwards: ‘Imagining myself male, I attempted to create myself male. Although I knew the case was otherwise, it seemed I could do nothing to make this other critically real.’3 The female reader, reading male-centred writing, is rendered doubly powerless, quoting from Judith Fetterley’s seminal text: ‘not simply the powerlessness that comes which derives from not seeing one’s experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly, the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify the self as male while being reminded that to be male – to be universal – is to be not female’.4 Yes, this is what I learnt as a child and adult reader. I experienced the powerlessness as terribly painful, and do so still. I longed for a choice of books and a way of reading that would remove that oppression. Schweickart describes the immasculation of the female reader reading male-centred books, a process to which the feminist reader must be relentlessly resistant. The only way for a woman, at least, to read by far the majority of literature is as a ‘resisting reader’. Androcentric literature is all the more efficient as an instrument of sexual politics because it does not allow the woman reader to seek refuge in her difference. Instead, it draws her into a process that uses her against herself. It solicits her complicity in the elevation of 2 Patrocinio P. Schweickart, ‘Reading ourselves: Towards a Feminine Theory of Reading’, in Flynn and Schweickart (eds), Gender and Reading, pp. 31–62. 3 Lee Edwards, ‘Women, energy and Middlemarch’, Massachusetts Review, 13 (1972): 226, quoted in Schweickart, ‘Reading ourselves’, p. 41. 4 Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Indiana University Press, 1978), p. xiii, quoted in Schweickart, ‘Reading ourselves’, p. 42 – Fetterley’s emphasis.

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male difference into universality and, accordingly the denigration of female difference into otherness without reciprocity.5

Resisting that level of manipulative power, from a lifetime of reading, is painful and exhausting. The female reader is constantly overwhelmed with disappointment. Her will to maintain her female identity is iteratively undermined and must be shored up not only against every attack from literature but in the face of the onslaught of words and images in a whole variety of media. But Schweickart also explores the connectivity available to women, reading as women, writings which are written by women, writing as women. The task now is ‘that of recovering, articulating, and elaborating positive expressions of women’s point of view, of celebrating the survival of this point of view in spite of the formidable forces that have been ranged against it’.6 And the aim is, grandly stated: ‘Feminist reading and writing alike are grounded in the interest of producing a community of feminist readers and writers, and in the hope that ultimately this community will expand to include everyone.’7 This is a view shared by Donna Przybylowicz. Feminist reading, in this view, seeks to undo what has been done by the mainstreaming of truly damaging androcentric literature: Women must therefore go beyond simply declaring their difference, which in some ways works against attaining equality. The main battle is to destroy the hegemonic phallocentric system. The demand should not be for an exclusively female society but for a society where men and women share the same anti-logocentric, anti-hierarchical values. Women’s history and accomplishments must be acknowledged and not subordinated to a marginal status or relegated to silence.8

Schweickart argues, therefore, that this model of feminist reading itself critiques the reader-response models put forward as post-structuralist ways of reading: Mainstream reader-response theories are preoccupied with issues of control and partition – how to distinguish the contribution of the author/text from the contribution of the reader. In the dialectic of communication informing the relationship between the feminist reader and the female author/text, the central issue is not of control or partition, but of managing the contradictory implications of the desire for relationship (one must maintain a minimal distance from the other) and the desire for intimacy, up to and including a symbiotic merger with the other.9

Post-structuralist hermeneutics arises from the recognition that texts do not contain or possess inalienable truth, which it is the reader’s responsibility simply to discover

5 Schweickart, ‘Reading ourselves’, p. 42. 6 Ibid., p. 51. 7 Ibid., p. 56. 8 Donna Przybylowicz, ‘Contemporary Issues in Feminist Theory’, in Joseph A. Buttigeig (ed.), Criticism without Boundaries (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1987), pp. 155–6. 9 Schweickart, ‘Reading ourselves’, p. 55.

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by reading. The reader him- or herself comes to the text in his or her own context, and meaning or truth exist, if they do, in the act of reading. Robert Scholes describes this as a move from interpretation to criticism: from a ‘submissive approach to the deep or hidden meanings of texts’ to seeking to locate ‘the codes invoked by the text and expose the means by which the text seeks to control our responses to it’.10 The corollary of this is that there is no single right interpretation, though there may be strategies for preferring one interpretation over another. The questions that constantly emerge are about truth, rightness and control. If these lie wholly in the text, the context of the reader disappears and the reader is rendered powerless. Most especially, the reader who is already marginalized by reason of factors such as gender, race or class is deprived of the power to engage with the text and either resists its manipulation, or enters into dialogue with it. On the other hand, if truth, rightness and control lie wholly with the reader, interpretation becomes irrevocably pluralist or multiplist. Readers with a powerful ideological approach have been accused of reducing the text to nothing: ‘Feminist or Marxian analysis has at times treated literature as little more than an ideological apparatus for conveying straightforward, manipulative messages.’11 Of course, this can be seen as the proper restoration of power to marginalized readers, which produces a new balance between reader and text. What moderates either of these extremes is the fact that neither the writer nor the reader exists in isolation. Each inhabits a context, and acts of reading differ in the extent to which those contexts interact. At first, this gives rise to a further set of problems with interpretation. It may be that the distance between writer and reader is so great that no interaction is possible. The whole enterprise of interpretation breaks down and the reader has to admit that s/ he has no way of arriving at an understanding of the intentions or meaning embodied in the text. To a certain extent, this is always true. The act of reading cannot discover ‘the truth’, even by learning everything about the writer’s context. Instead, the act of reading enters into an ongoing process of interpretation. Richardson, Flowers and Guignon describe this as a circular process, in which the reader is embedded in a context, and helps to give that context meaning for the future. There is no exit from this circle: not by going back to an ‘uninterpreted given’ in the original text, nor by going forward to the correct solution, to be one day discovered. The process is open-ended, and always being passed into the hands of future generations of readers. The reader, therefore, is not capricious or anarchic. Reading, by its very nature, takes place in a community and a context. The reader has a responsibility to recognize the context of reading. ‘Our embeddedness in the public world is seen not as an

10 Robert Scholes, ‘Interpretation and Criticism in the Classroom’, in Stuart Peterfreund (ed.), Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature (Boston: Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, 1985), pp. 38, 42, quoted in Marcel Cornis-Pope, Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 11. 11 Cornis-Pope, Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting, pp. 38–9.

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impediment to understanding but rather as the window that first makes possible any understanding at all.’12 The process described by Richardson, Flowers and Guignon as circular in fact looks more like a shape familiar to feminist thinking, that of the spiral, in which closed circular movement is opened to include a linear progress. New contexts are created; the enterprise is capable of moving forward, or back, for that matter. The future does not replay exactly the same encounters again and again. Communities of readers exist in tension and criticize each other’s presuppositions, and diverse readings move into and out of agreement as new communities are formed, or individuals move from one community to another. Thus, feminists can speak optimistically, as Schweickart and Przybylowicz do, about a kind of reading which has the power to change, not only interpretation of texts, but the world. The Power of ‘Sacred’ Text in Confessing Communities I grew up in the world described by Segel and Schweickart, which elevated boys’ reading over girls’, and created literary canons that excluded writing by women. But this experience was vastly exacerbated by religious worship which rendered women all but invisible. The hymns that we sang were all about men and brothers. The prayers that I heard were the same. Even though I came from a tradition of extempore prayer, and which placed the sermon at the heart of worship, therefore allowing a great deal of freedom of expression to the worship leader, there was never a hint that the female half of the human race existed. The hermeneutics of those days, and that of an overwhelming majority of Christians at the turn of the twentieth/twenty-first century, is both structuralist and androcentric. It is structuralist in seeing the text as full of truth and meaning, which the pious reader can grasp through a series of interpretive methods intended to reveal what is there. This is the only world in which ‘context’ is a four letter word, used, so it is argued, by women to get round the teachings of Leviticus and Paul! The patriarchal androcentricity of the text is patent. The Bible begins with the temptation of humankind through the susceptible weakness of the woman; it proceeds through a number of communities in which women are rendered totally dependent by laws which make them possessions alongside a man’s ox and his ass; the climax of the Christian scriptures comes when God becomes a male human being; there is a glimpse of light, when the male incarnation of the patriarchal God starts to speak to and include women, but this is swiftly smothered by macho-Paul and the male leadership of an increasingly institutionalized Church. The text in all its diversity is all about men, told by men, written, compiled and edited by men and, for the past 2,000 to 5,000 years, has been interpreted by men. The weight of this manipulation of the human race to exalt one gender by diminishing the other to less than human status cannot be overstated, especially when this is a text

12 ‘What is hermeneutics?’ in Frank C. Richardson, Blaine J. Flowers and Charles B. Guignon, Re-envisioning Psychology: Moral Dimensions of Theory and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), p. 267.

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that is still regarded as sacred, that is, a normative or even infallible guide, for human society, by millions of individuals and several whole communities. The past thirty or more years has seen a huge enterprise to find resisting and recovering readings of the kind described by Schweickart and others. Poststructuralism has meant that readers and reading communities can develop interpretation by interacting with the text from within their own context. The aim has been not only to develop feminist biblical hermeneutics, but to set this in the context of liberation hermeneutics alongside, for example, dispossessed indigenous peoples’ reading of the conquest and depeopling of Canaan. An early call to resisting reading came in Phyllis Trible’s, Texts of Terror,13 which faced the horrors of biblical violence against women head on. Just as colonizers and colonized have to face the realities of biblical genocide, so men as well as women have to face the realities of stories of rape, murder, dismemberment, incest, all the casual abuse of women’s sexuality and humanity. Alice Laffey wrote a chilling analysis of the depiction of women in the Hebrew Scriptures, under the title, Wives, Harlots and Concubines.14 We were learning to read the codes, and finding strategies for resistance. But was it possible to do any recovering, of the kind Schweickart suggests that women can do in reading women’s writing? Technically, it is not possible to tell whether any ‘women’s writing’ remains in scripture. It is possible that fragments of story-telling by women are recoverable, such as the Song of Deborah (Judges 5), or that anonymous sources, such as the letter to the Hebrews, conceal women authors. But there is not enough evidence to seek connectivity and recovery. However, there are stories about women, and there is language which affirms female gender, and the attempt to recover these has formed a great part of the enterprise of feminist hermeneutics. This task, in itself, is a kind of resistance to the layers of editing and interpretation which overlie such texts. It has been fascinating to discover Deborah, Sarah and Huldah, Mary Magdalene, Priscilla and the countless anonymous women whose stories are told in the New Testament. As the stories are read by different communities, new complexities emerge. Sarah is not only hero, but the oppressor of Hagar, the victim of multiple oppression. Leah, no longer the ‘ugly sister’, is a powerful woman, honoured by God. Martha speaks out and the long centuries of slander against Mary Magdalene are peeled back. The great narrative about God is also re-read. There are female images of God in scripture: Wisdom, Ruach (the Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures), the mother bear, mother bird, housewife . . . This, again, forms part of a wider context, which resists the androcentric, patriarchal image of the Warrior-King-God, Lord of Hosts, who slays the enemies of His people, and is not above slaying them too if they disobey, and seeks to recover images of love, justice and care for the poor. In the 1990s, Athalya Brenner edited a whole set of Feminist Companions to the Hebrew Scriptures, published by Sheffield Academic Press. This was followed in the 13 Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: literary feminist readings of Biblical narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 14 Alice Laffey, Wives, Harlots and Concubines: the Old Testament in Feminist Perspective (London: SPCK, 1990).

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new millennium by a series on the New Testament edited by Amy Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff. Authors included confessing and non-confessing writers. But the enterprise takes place not only in biblical scholarship, but also within communities for which this is a sacred text. There is a great upsurge of liturgical material: hymns, prayers, liturgical actions. As feminist confessing communities read the Bible, they do so in the context of celebration and worship, and, to a certain extent, the work of feminist liturgists is beginning to influence mainstream worshipping communities. This connection between reading and a community of religious praxis is part of the challenge to feminism by womanist writers. A cross-cultural symposium reported in Feminist Interpretations of the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Liberation15 makes this point. Many Western women, feminist theologians included, not only lack religious praxis but also have only the slightest hint . . . about what religious functions and forms are. This gradual loss or concealment of religion has been spread throughout the world (without explicit declaration) in the form of feminist literature, as the white lady’s neo-colonial export item. And it is highly doubtful whether this serves the liberation of (all) women.16

This means that the feminist hermeneutical enterprise, on its own, fails in its cosmic optimistic dream of transforming the world. Feminist post-structuralist hermeneutics simply cannot open the door wide enough for all the world to pass through. The aim of ‘a society where men and women share the same anti-logocentric, anti-hierarchical values’17 cannot be realized without reference to wider political issues. The Bible needs to be seen as ‘a politically drenched text invested in ordering relations between people, legitimizing some view points and delegitimizing others’.18 The context of the reader is similarly politicized: ‘Meaning takes place in the charged encounter between socially and politically conditioned text and socially and politically conditioned reader.’19 The political context includes multiple marginalization through lack of access to resources, race, caste, gender, and a whole host of other factors. There is a danger, argue these writers, that western feminists fail to be connected with these communities. ‘A hermeneutics of liberation is directed at the praxis of overcoming the social, political and religious injustices under which women suffer. For feminist exegesis this means that a global discussion about the

15 Ed. Silvia Schroer and Sophia Bietenhard, JSOTS 374 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003). 16 Silvia Schroer, ‘Introduction’, in Silvia Schroer and Sophia Bietenhard (eds), Feminist Interpretations of the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Liberation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), p. 7. 17 Przybylowicz ‘Contemporary Issues in Feminist Theory’, in Buttigeig (ed.), Criticism without Boundaries, p. 156. 18 Renita Weems, ‘Re-reading for Liberation: African American Women and the Bible’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series, JSOT 374 (2003), p. 24. 19 Ibid., p. 26.

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factors involved in liberation and oppression, about methods and hermeneutics, should take place.’20 The situation becomes wildly complex as the Bible is read within the diversity of communities that encounter it, especially if reading remains fully connected to the culture of the community. Musa Dube and Jeffrey Staley’s book, John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power,21 focuses on John’s gospel from a variety of cultural perspectives. Dube writes: ‘The writers … seek to clear a small space where members of our differing worlds can be involved in creating a world of liberating interdependence; a world of balanced co-existence, where all “is good”; where none are involved in the exploitation or suppression of others.’22 While the editorial hand of Musa Dube and Jeffrey Staley bring coherence to the post-colonial voices in this volume, no editorial control can impose coherence or even collectivity on the enterprise of post-structuralist hermeneutics. As we have been forced out of the narrow confines of 1970s feminist theology (singular) into the kaleidoscopic world of culturally based and culture-challenging exegesis, any semblance of control of the agenda or the story must inevitably – and rightly – disappear. In another book edited by Musa Dube, Musimbi Kanyoro comments that ‘something significant is happening to theological analysis . . . brought to theology mainly by women of the southern hemisphere . . . Cultural hermeneutics can help us develop a vision for mature cultural dialogues. The complexities inherent in cultural debate require a safe environment of mutual trust and mutual vulnerability in order for dialogue to take place.’23 All this is very energizing and optimistic, and important for those who do regard this text as sacred. However, there is a real question why non-confessing feminist readers should bother with the Bible. Recent writers deplore the optimistic efforts of the late twentieth century, and argue that they have failed to bring to the reading of the sacred text the same rigour of post-structuralist interpretation that other communities of readers bring to other canons of literature. The Bible and Culture Collective calls for a radically different approach to biblical hermeneutics: If biblical reader-response critics did take seriously the collapse of their dichotomous text-reader model, then critical attention could shift from the textual object to how readers make meaning within a set of particular reading conventions. Furthermore, once reading practices are viewed as the site of the construction of reality and are questioned self-

20 Schroer, ‘Introduction’, in Schroer and Bietenhard (eds), Feminist Interpretations of the Bible, p. 15. 21 Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. 22 Musa Dube and Jeffrey Staley, ‘Descending from and Ascending into Heaven’, in Musa Dube and Jeffrey Staley (eds) John and Postcolonialism (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 5. 23 Musimbi R.A. Kanyoro, ‘Cultural Hermeneutics: An African Contribution’, in Musa Dube (ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible (Geneva, WCC Publications, 2001), p. 105.

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reflexively, then this could open up the question of the ethics and politics of reading that has surfaced so forcefully in other guilds.24

and If biblical critics want to unmask the ideological ends and the material effects of their readings, as many indeed do, then they must become more self-reflexive about their ideological appropriating of the theories of reader-response criticism. For although their methods have changed, biblical critics, like many other close readers, keep reading their texts with the same ideological goals that they have used for years.25

The enterprise is really much more difficult than the optimistic efforts of the mid- to late twentieth century recognized. The context in which we read the Bible is one which has been carved out, for longer than we can properly imagine, by the text we are trying to read. It is extremely hard to escape the context, to move, ‘from a submissive approach to the deep or hidden meanings of texts that have already, in advance, been accorded the privileged status of scripture’, to seeking to locate ‘the codes invoked by the text and expose the means by which the text seeks to control our responses to it’.26 The Sheffield Academic Press series of Feminist Companions to the books of the Hebrew Bible included a Feminist Companion to reading the Bible, in which Pamela Milne argues the point.27 She distinguishes confessing from non-confessing feminist readings, and calls on more non-confessing readers to engage with the Bible, not because it is a sacred text, but because of its undoubted influence on political and social life. They will be able to do so without the assumption, perhaps inevitably made by confessing readers, that the Bible is worth redeeming from patriarchy, and that it can be redeemed. In her interpretation of Genesis, she has shown what it is like to work without these assumptions. Reading the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, she suggests that structuralist readings, which are inherently patriarchal and dualistic, arise from the text, which is itself patriarchal and binary: Dualistic interpretations have not simply been ‘imposed’ upon Genesis 2–3, as some feminist reformists have argued, but rather derived from it. There is a kind of hermeneutical

24 The Bible and Culture Collective, The Postmodern Bible (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 53. Guilds here are academic/ecclesiastical specialists. 25 Ibid., p. 60. 26 Robert Scholes, ‘Interpretation and Criticism in the Classroom’, in Stuart Peterfreund (ed.), Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature (Boston: Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, 1985), pp. 38, 42, quoted in Marcel Cornis-Pope, Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 11. 27 Pamela J. Milne, ‘Towards Feminist Companionship’, in Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine (eds), A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 39–60.

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In the case of this text, she argues, the optimistic enterprise of finding a feminist interpretation of Eve’s part in the Fall is not possible. This means that the entire edifice of Christian interpretation of women’s place in the doctrines of sin and salvation, insofar as they draw from the story of the Fall, cannot be interpreted from a feminist perspective. The text can only be, and must be, resisted: ‘If we are looking for a sacred scripture that is not patriarchal, that does not construct women as ‘other’ and that does not support patriarchal interpretations based on this otherness, we are not likely to find it or to recover it in texts such as Genesis 2–3.’29 However, this does not mean that the text is not worth reading. Milne quotes the case of The Women’s Bible, which was published in 1895 not as a resource for the feminist faithful but because of its overwhelming influence on political and social life, especially the battle for suffrage and the position of women in society.30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw that the patriarchal teachings of the Bible were used relentlessly to counter women’s emancipation in every walk of life, not only in matters of faith: ‘When, in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, women began to protest against their civil and political degradation, they were referred to the Bible for an answer.’31 The same Bible had been used to justify slavery and the assumptions of racial superiority that undergirded the colonial/missionary enterprise. Its influence was far reaching and global: ‘So long as tens of thousands of Bibles are printed every year, and circulated over the whole habitable globe, and the masses in all English-speaking nations revere it as the word of God, it is vain to belittle its influence.’32 It was worth wrestling with the text to undermine the damage done not only to women, but to the world as it came under the colonizing influence of so-called Christian civilisations – and the damage done not only to the colonized, but to the colonizers. The imbalance of power and autonomy was detrimental to the selfrealisation of the powerful and, as we are now finding out, disastrous to the biosphere itself. It was worth engaging with a book that had such devastating influence. And this is still the case. The triumphalist, apocalyptic language used by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, and its application to the war in Iraq and who knows what else, shows how structuralist interpretations of the Bible can be used to justify rank injustice and an intolerably dualistic worldview. With a President who professes an extreme right wing Christianity, and who is advised by Christians 28 Pamela J. Milne, ‘The Patriarchal Stamp of Scripture: The Implications of Structuralist Analyses for Feminist Hermeneutics’, in Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Genesis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), p. 166, my emphasis. 29 Ibid., p. 166. 30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible: The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible, Abridged Edition with introduction by Dale Spender (Glasgow: Polygon Books, 1985); see Pamela J. Milne, ‘Towards a Feminist Companionship’, in Brenner and Fontaine (eds), A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible, pp. 52–3. 31 Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, p. 8. 32 Ibid., p. 11.

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of that persuasion, to the despair of the rest of the Christian community, the influence of the structuralist, androcentric Bible is in the ascendant and the wholesale damage it does is abundantly clear. And the Christian faith is growing very fast in the non-western world, and recent struggles in the Anglican Communion have shown how the new ecclesiastical power bases can overturn a movement towards inclusive and liberal ideas. While liberation theologians read the Bible from the perspective of marginalized communities, the leaders of many fast-growing churches read it as a straightforward patriarchal text, and a licence for misogyny, power-seeking and oppression. Meanwhile, the optimistic readings of liberation theologies, including feminist and womanist communities, tend to be dismissed as untrue to the Bible and irrelevant in the twenty-first century. Language of peace, justice, empowerment, reconciliation and healing, which arise from readings of some prophetic writings and some of the teachings and actions of Jesus in the context of disempowered and marginalized communities, is ignored in favour of the language of power and domination. This is where the spiral is at the moment. Resisting readers of the Bible, and maybe those who seek to recover and redeem as well, need to keep reading and reading, so that we in the future, or future generations, may pick up the spiral as it turns away from global violence again. In my own context, my stance is different because of the reading done by the creators of The Woman’s Bible, and the work done by feminist and liberation theologians. The context within which I am working is different even from that of my own past. Resisting has become more possible, as I tread parts of the spiral already well travelled by others, and more difficult as patriarchy constantly regroups and roars back at those who dare to read their Bible. Three Readings This next section earths the theory of the chapter in some actual readings of Scripture. Of course, the perspective varies, and readings tend to critique each other. However, they share a vigour of analysis, and a ‘hope against hope’ that reading in which the reader engages can be transforming. The first is directly in response to the horrifying aftermath of 9/11 in the US: ‘Territory, Terror and Torture: Dream-reading the Apocalypse’ by Catherine Keller.33 Keller embarks on what she calls a ‘dreamreading’ of the Christian Apocalypse, set against the post-modern, cyberpunk, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.34 She sets herself the task of the protagonist of Hardboiled Wonderland, to be a Dreamreader, and to reveal the old dreams of the Apocalypse and the new dreams which arise from it when read by those who might be termed its ‘ideal readers’. If the text is read by people who believe that they are defined and described by it, without the need for any kind of resistance, the result is a kind of vicious circle (not a spiral) of confirmation. Keller quotes George Bush: ‘We are in a conflict between 33 In Feminist Theology, 14.1 (August 2005): 47–67; also in Catherine Keller, God and Power (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). 34 Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, trans. by A. Birnbaum (New York: Vintage, 1991).

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good and evil, and America will call evil by its name . . . By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in solving it.’35 Characteristically of apocalyptic, there is no dialogue, no negotiation, no room for the ‘evil’ to repent and join the ‘righteous’, and certainly no question of recognizing good and evil on both ‘sides’. ‘Good’ is symbolized by the warrior on the white horse, who mates with the heavenly city, and ‘evil’ by the beast, who mates with the whore. But, Keller puts the dreamreader’s question: Who is mimicking whom? Does the mimesis go only one way? For both cities, the New Jerusalem as well as Rome, war is to bring peace, violence to bring justice, dominance to bring freedom. How should a vulnerable and victimized community fight an empire that bullies and seduces the whole world, except by a secret empire, with armed angelic hosts led by the shining warrior on a white horse, empowered by the transcendent throne of All-Power? John’s virtual basileia, his ‘empire of God’, shadow-boxes with the Roman empire; leading an army outperforming in militancy any imperial troops, his holy warrior will be as ruthless as any Caesar.36

The Bush administration and the allies of the US during the Iraq war, used the rhetoric of peace-making, indeed, of global peace, democracy and freedom. But, as Keller’s article reveals, the rhetoric of peace sits alongside that of pain and terror in the apocalyptic dream. The righteous gain the victory by the infliction of pain and terror: ‘We will so terrify our potential enemies by the guarantee of their unilateral destruction, should they threaten our “interests”, that they will submit as impotently as victims of torture.’37 Further: It is through torture that the misogyny of the text gets satisfaction: when the Great Whore falls, it is not enough to announce her destruction; she is subjected to a ritual of sexual torture, stripped naked, raped, cooked and eaten. Moreover, the woman who shines like the sun, the so-called Queen of Heaven, is said to suffer birth pangs like torture – the word used, basinizomai, for her speechless cries (Rev. 12:2), is not otherwise used of birth but signifies testimony given by slaves under torture.38

The aim of pain and terror, inflicted by both sides in the great battle, is the establishment of a new world. Keller notes that the vision is not that of a territorial empire, spreading throughout the world, but the creation of a de-territorialized aeon of peace at the end of time. But she sees in the US response to 9/11 a merger between the righteous warrior and the beast, and, similarly, a merger between the de-territorializing rhetoric of world freedom, peace and democracy, and the re35 West Point, 2002, quoted in Keller, ‘Revealing Evil’, p. 47. 36 Keller, ‘Territory, Terror and Torture: Dream-reading the Apocalypse’, Feminist Theology, 14.1 (August 2005), p. 52. 37 Ibid., pp. 61–2. She adds in a footnote, ‘Cf. National Security Strategy, p. 29. This trajectory supports Noam Chomsky’s designation of the US as “a leading terrorist state”. 9/11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 43.’ 38 Keller, ‘Territory, Terror and Torture’, p. 60.

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territorializing yearning for a sacred homeland – or, as she puts it, ‘between the secular have-a-nice-day desires Disneyfying, Coca-colating, IBM-ing and General Motoring the globe; and the yearning for a securely bounded existence in a homeland, Jerusalem, of one’s own’.39 Keller the dreamreader reads the Apocalypse as read by the ‘ideal’ reader, the American right wing evangelical. In this, she is locating ‘the codes invoked by the text’ and exposing ‘the means by which the text seeks to control our responses to it’.40 The codes take on a terror of their own, as they enter into an escalating narcissistic reflection with readers who see only themselves in the images of power in the story, and who read according to a purely structuralist paradigm. They believe that they are reading ‘the truth’ that is in the text and that ‘the truth’ is about them. But Keller takes a step back from this idealized reading to scrutinize the underlying metaphor, which is the divinization of power: ‘The theo-political problem is not just that a nation pretends to a god-like unilateral power, but that unilateral power still appears as god-like at all.’41 Her optimism lies in the possibility of undoing this metaphor and posing a different dream, reading the same text. At this point, in the face of the moral atrocity of each of the Abrahamisms, some of us still reread the old dreams. We work to heal the nightmares. The imaginary of omnipotence could evolve into a cosmically democratized ideal of co-creativity. New resonances between the religions produce an alternative, but still messianic, intensity, with an attractive vocabulary of spiritual pluralism.42

This reading is just as rooted in the world post-9/11. The text remains the same, but the reader is now resisting the violence and dualism of the text. She speaks of a ‘counterapocalypse that is at the same time a counter-globalization’.43 This is globalization from below, a term that Keller finds in Richard Falk’s Religion and Humane Global Governance,44 where it consists of ‘alternative trans-national formations such as social justice movements, NGO’s, the religious left, and environmental groups’.45 The resisting reading of the Apocalypse is optimistic about the future of the world and its peoples. The reading by the ‘ideal’ reader releases the violence and dualism in the text in destructive force into the world. Post-9/11 is still very fresh. At the time of writing, shortly after the first elections in Iraq, violence continues seemingly unabated. It remains to be seen where the spiral of re-reading texts will take the feminist community, and whether the rather raw counter-apocalypse will be formative for future reading communities. The second reading is a liturgical reading within a confessing community. For some years, I have been chairing a Mission and Worship group in the Council for World Mission European Region. We recently held two conferences with two other 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., p. 56. Scholes, ‘Interpretation and Criticism in the Classroom’. Keller, ‘Territory, Terror and Torture’, p. 66, her emphasis. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Keller, Territory, Terror and Torture’, p. 67, note 41.

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European Reformed mission bodies: United Evangelical Mission (UEM) in Germany and La Communanté d’Eglises in Mission (CEVAA) France. Our task has been to explore the way in which mission is expressed in worship in the context of Western Europe at the turn of the third millennium. All three mission bodies have made strenuous efforts to move away from the Euro-centric colonial theology of mission to a pattern of global partnership. The group’s work takes place in the context of rapidly declining mainstream churches, within increasing cultural complexity, and our conferences have included representatives of ‘mainstream’ churches, ‘migrant’ or ‘ethnic’ churches (all very sensitive terms) and global partners. At the most recent conference, at the CEVAA conference centre in Sète, in the south of France, we took the theme, ‘Singing Jahweh’s Song in a Strange Land’, based, of course, on Psalm 137. What happened was quite extraordinary. The Psalm took on its own life within the conference, largely due to the willingness of a large proportion of the participants to allow it to expose their own vulnerability. We conducted an exercise in our opening worship, in which the fifty or so participants listened to a reading of the Psalm, and were invited to read aloud, in turn, the phrase or verse that had ‘spoken’ to them. For many, it was the question, ‘How can we sing Jahweh’s song in a strange land?’ For some, there were words of fierce loyalty: ‘If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you.’ We had wondered whether to curtail the reading and use of the Psalm, as is often done, before the very violent last verses, but there were those, even at this early stage in the conference, who passionately spoke the words, ‘Remember … what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell: “Tear it down”, they cried, “tear it down to its foundations!”’ and even, ‘happy is the one who takes your children and dashes them against the rocks’! What was happening? The Psalm seemed to be releasing jets of extremely powerful emotion. Alongside the question we were expecting to ask, ‘What is the strange land in which we are asked, or we ask others to sing?’ arose the more disturbing questions: ‘What is the Jerusalem to which some of us are so grimly loyal?’ ‘Whose sins are we calling on God so vengefully to remember?’ Far from discreetly turning away from the end of the Psalm, the conference was embracing it. Each of the three language groups led evening worship, and these sessions too were affected by the sense of grief and bitterness that had overcome the gathering. The most controversial symbol came on the last evening. In a worship time that focused on emptiness, an empty paten and chalice was passed solemnly round the group. Some even said the words, ‘The body of Christ, broken for you’ and ‘The blood of Christ shed for you’ as the breadless and wineless containers circulated. In the plenary session, this empty communion focused the unease of some participants, not only at the perversion of Christian ritual but also on the rawness of the emotions that had been released. The reaction of different participants was illuminating. The religious professionals, especially those who lived in parts of Western Europe where the churches were doing relatively well, deplored the atmosphere and symbolism: ‘This is wrong; the cup and plate are never empty – Christ is always there. We should be doing something positive.’

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Participant members of migrant or ethnic minority churches within Europe were more ambivalent. They were shocked by the communion service, but they recalled their connection with communities where the cup and plate of ordinary daily nourishment were empty, and their historic connection with communities which had been forced to live desolate lives of slavery, which included the real perversion of the broken body and shed blood of Christ. Yet others simply acknowledged that there are times for weeping and using the bitter language of the Psalms. For sure, we all want to be positive, but our honesty in interaction with this song of lament was shatteringly and astonishingly powerful. We were weeping not for our declining churches, but for the bitter history of Europe and its influence in the world, for centuries of bloodshed, genocide, torture and oppression, for the pollution and rape of the world. Martin Heider wrote a haunting song on the theme, which included the verses: 2 Strange is the news of an army breaking doors of catastrophes and wars, killing the humble. Strange is the news that unjust are going free although all the blind can see how righteous stumble. But even stranger is the news that you save those we accuse, make an end to all abuse through your kingdom where the river of our tears will be gone with all our fears; even death then disappears in your kingdom. 3 Strange is the sound from a throat about to die breathing out the final cry of an oppressor. Strange is the sound of the wordless silent song of the mighty who went wrong, and the aggressor. But even stranger is the sound of your presence all around when your spirit will abound in your kingdom where the river of our tears will be gone with all our fears; even death then disappears in your kingdom. 46 46 Martin Heider, ‘Strange is the Land’, Worship Live, issue 32 (summer 2005): 12–13.

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True to our post-structural interaction with the text, we came out with no one right answer. There was no ‘conference statement’ to the august bodies that had sent us. Instead, we went back to our homes and jobs and churches confused but enriched by this collective encounter. The third of these readings comes from the very specific context of post-apartheid South Africa, and particularly the experience of Black women. Exegetes from various African contexts have demonstrated the power of reading the Bible alongside indigenous oral story-telling traditions, and in the light of cultural practices, in which some African societies mirror the life portrayed in the Bible. Circles of Concerned African Women in Theology meet in different parts of Africa, bringing together women from different faith communities and with different levels of education to do theology and interpret the Bible together. Gloria Kehilwe Plaatjie explores this collaborative way of reading the Bible in her article, ‘Towards a Post-Apartheid Black Feminist Reading of the Bible: A Case of Luke 2:36-38’.47 As a way of reading it is well documented.48 The aim is to read ‘from and with’ so-called ‘ordinary’ readers. Of course, the use of the term ‘ordinary’ is hotly debated, but it generally denotes collaboration with non-academic readers. Plaatjie describes the double focus of the process: ‘It is essential to integrate the voices of non-academic readers. At the same time, however, it is important to remain critical of our own culture and of biblical cultures that authorize the oppression of women.’49 She reads the story of the prophet Anna from and with Black South African women from Mankweng. She records discussion of three questions: ‘What do you think of Anna the Prophet?’; ‘What do you understand by the role of a prophet?’; and ‘Do you want to be a prophet in the church and in general society?’ The answers vary, of course, but Plaatjie discerns two strands of response. One group of answers defines Anna’s long and celibate widowhood in terms of her collusion with patriarchal norms. She remains unmarried out of loyalty to her dead husband, to protect her children, or to avoid going through the oppressive rituals of widowhood, which the women know in their own culture and to which they will unwillingly submit. While they recognize Anna as a prophet, they would not wish to take on such a role, as it would be onerous and expose them to the accusation of witchcraft. Another group see Anna’s decision to remain unmarried as an act of independence, and one which ‘encourages women to trust in themselves and to be trusted by other

47 In Musa Dube (ed.), Other Ways of Reading. 48 Plaatjie cites Gerald West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation: Modes of Reading the Bible in South African Context, 2nd edition (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 1995); several articles by T.S. Maluleke; Musimbi Kanyoro, ‘Cultural Hermeneutics: An African Contribution’, in Ofelia Ortega (ed.), Women’s Visions: Theological Reflections, Celebration, Action (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1995), also in Dube (ed.), Other Ways of Reading; and Musa Dube, ‘Readings of Semoya: Batswana Women’s Interpretations of Matt. 15:21–28’, in Semeia, 73: 111–29. 49 Gloria Kehilwe Plaatjie, ‘Towards a Post-apartheid Black Feminist Reading of the Bible’, in Musa Dube (ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible (Geneva, WCC Publications, 2001), p. 128.

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people in the community’.50 This is seen as an empowering response: ‘If the women of Mankweng assert that a woman can trust herself and be trusted by others, they are reading against patriarchal values that have taught many women not to trust in themselves and other public figures who are women. They are offering a strategy of resistance.’51 This group of responses includes the recognition that the calling of a prophet is onerous and dangerous, but suggests a willingness to take it up despite that. Plaatjie goes on to argue that, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, neither African cultures, nor the Bible, nor the combination of these in Black theology is sufficient to liberate Black South African women. Under apartheid, Black women suffered multiple discrimination, as described in the novel, cited by Plaatjie, And They Didn’t Die.52 Like the hero of this story, Black women ‘have been economically, legally, politically, and socially disadvantaged by a constitutionally orchestrated programme of apartheid’, and ‘Black South African women … still face problems of poverty, violence, marginalization and unequal gender relations’.53 However, there exists a text, an authoritative text with relevance to the lives of Black women, indeed one for which Black women, among others, struggled and died under apartheid. It is the new South African Constitution. Plaatjie gives the Constitution a very high position: ‘If we bear in mind how many people died to bring about this dignity [of all human beings], we would agree that the new Constitution is indeed a sacred text, a text that stands next to the Bible for black South African women and other victims in apartheid.’54 In fact, it has a better standing, since the Bible was used to justify apartheid. The Bible, which itself ‘indulges in both patriarchal and apartheid oppression’,55 is not sufficient to bring about change. Plaatjie argues that ‘reading the Bible with and through the new South African Constitution is imperative’.56 She goes on to outline a set of strategies for reading the Bible through and with the Constitution, and from and with Black women, as a post-apartheid Black feminist way of reading the Bible. It includes making the Constitution accessible and known to women, comparing biblical law with South African customary law and constitutional law, with regard to the place of women, and a programme of analysis of institutions which administer constitutional rights. Plaatjie begins from a reading from and with ‘ordinary’ Black women, but she also speaks from her position of expertise, to critique their responses and suggest a wide-ranging and radical reformation in the way the Bible is read in post-apartheid South Africa.

50 p. 133. 51 52 53 54 55 56

Response quoted in Plaatjie, ‘Towards a Post-apartheid Black Feminist Reading’, Plaatjie, ‘Towards a Post-apartheid Black Feminist Reading’, p. 133. Loretta Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die (London: Virago, 1990). Plaatjie, ‘Towards a Post-apartheid Black Feminist Reading’, pp. 134, 135. Ibid., p. 117 (my italics). Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 134.

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Three post-structuralist ways of reading and interpreting the Bible serve barely to illustrate the vast complexity of cultural responses, methods of reading and outcomes of post-structural hermeneutics. But there are some general principles, which relate to the definitions of post-structuralism. Firstly and most important, none of these readings assumes a static truth in the text, which the reader’s only task is to search out. In each of the three cases, the interpretation lay in the complex interaction between the text, a number of readers, and other texts. Keller is resisting the dualist and misogynist message of apocalyptic writing, especially as read by a particular group of Christians in the US. She uses the mindscape of a piece of pulp fiction to assist her dreamreading of apocalypse to a different and liberating conclusion. Our mission and liturgy conference did not resist the text. Instead we yielded to its full emotional force. We resisted the rational resisting we had been doing for years and found ourselves interpreting and challenging our complex of cultures in its light. Plaatjie finds hope in the ability of oppressed women to recover the story of a strong and prophetic woman, and proposes strategies to offer greater empowerment, using another authoritative text to enable the readers to resist the patriarchal message of the Bible. In each case, the motivation is liberative. We are caught up in the optimistic cosmic hope expressed by Schweickart and Przybylowicz and others. When we recognize the overwhelming and insidious influence of patriarchal oppression, we may well weep, or rage, but these readers do not despair. They re-interpret, resist, sing and devise strategies for change. And still in the background of each group of readers is the distant roar of Daddy Bear; the protector of traditional values, the structuralist reader, who does not resist because his position in society, his values and his self-worth are affirmed and reaffirmed by the canon of literature, by the oral traditions of a thousand cultures, and above all by the authority of Scripture. To the question ‘Who’s been reading MY Bible?’, the answer is, ‘WE HAVE!’.

Chapter 6

Post-Christian Hermeneutics: The Rise and Fall of Female Subjectivity in Theological Narrative J’annine Jobling

‘Feminism,’ states Daphne Hampson, ‘represents the death-knell of Christianity as a viable religious option’ (Hampson, 1990, p. 1). Rosemary Radford Ruether, by contrast, acknowledges the profound difficulties with Christianity from a feminist point of view, but seeks also to see what can be retained and transformed: ‘What of this rubble, much of it quite toxic, can be composted and made fertilizer for new life?’ (Ruether, 1983, p. xii). Meanwhile, other strands of feminist thought remain deeply committed to inhabiting the ‘traditional’ Christian framework through strategies such as insisting that the problem is patriarchal modes of interpretation rather than patriarchal core concepts and texts; while yet others seek to steer a determinedly moderate course through the Scylla of ossified orthodoxy and the Charybdis of revolutionary change. As Schaab expresses it, this is part of a three-fold spectrum of critique, retrieval and (re)construction, with the aim: ‘to analyze inherited traditions through a deconstruction of texts and formulations, to search for women’s alternative wisdom and suppressed history, and to risk new interpretations in conversation with women’s lives’ (Schaab, 2001). Christian self-understanding is rooted, at least in part, in the narratives and stories which make up the Bible. The tensions are clear to those who can slip the lens of a feminist hermeneutic across their reading eye, and they are deep-rooted. What if the feminist experiences primarily dissonance between her worldviews and the habitus of the story-worlds? What if the response evoked is not faith, nor a sense of rootedness in a religious community, nor indeed any sense that these texts have something useful or fruitful to say to her – but rather her desire is to resist the texts and reject the stories as harmful and damaging to women? For the feminist, telling God’s story through the biblical narratives may equate to telling the story of women’s oppression and subjugation, and the freezing of women on the margins of religious discourses. Feminism has thus contributed to the development of post-Christian and (more broadly) post-traditional theologies, which encompass a range of different trajectories.1 What does ‘post-Christian’ designate? Ironically, ‘to post’ is a historical 1 As Christ notes, one such set have moved towards thealogy, exemplified by the movements known (among other terms) as ‘spiritual feminism’ or ‘Goddess feminism’. She

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term signifying denouncement; exposure as iniquitous. In this respect, have feminists ‘posted’ Christianity? The epithet ‘post’ is often taken to mean simply ‘after’, implying a chronological and philosophical departure from a founding movement. However, as Gray and McPhillips warn, this risks polarizing the debate along ‘exodus/ apologist’ lines; rather, they suggest, ‘we would want to argue that post-Christianity actually invites a critical examination of the project of her/story, particularly where specific histories – the histories of women – have been forcibly repressed … ’ The connotations of ‘post’ then emerge from its figuration of boundaries, and its capacity thereby to act as marker of excess; of both containment and inability to contain; of allowing the hitherto unknown to rupture those very boundaries it attempts to impose. Perhaps we should abandon the post, suggest Gray and McPhillips: for it marks ‘its own phallicism, its own oppression, its own refusal of wild possibility, of abandonment of the known for the unknown’ (Gray and McPhillips, 2001). Such an understanding of ‘post-traditional’ – or more specifically, ‘postChristian’ – aligns with the reintroduction of diachronicity in post-structuralism. The structuralist effacement of history gives way to a critical examination of its twists, discontinuities and ideological curvatures. Furthermore, the particular gains priority over the (hypostasized) universal. With respect to biblical and theological interpretation, this invites the re-examination and re-articulation of textual and interpretative discourses with a view to allowing excluded, marginalized and oppressed perspectives to emerge. It encourages what Segovia names intercultural criticism, whereby the text, the reader and other readers are all recognized as ‘others’ to be ‘acknowledged, respected and engaged in [their] very otherness’ (Segovia, 1994, p. 171). It decentres the sovereign pronunciation of ‘truth’, and instead points to the articulation of ‘truths’ from multiple embodied and contextual localities. In what follows, I shall attempt a ‘post-Christian’ reading of two key mythic moments in biblical narrative and theologies – the Christological drama of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, and the so-called ‘creation and fall’ account of Genesis 2– 3.2 The re-readings are undertaken from a feminist perspective and privilege gender; specifically, there is a focus on female subjectivity and its symbolic ‘rise’ and ‘fall’. It is acknowledged that this is inevitably a partial and limited hermeneutic lens. I take inspiration in these readings from Luce Irigaray’s philosophy; this narrows the lens yet further, and implies a particular academic and theoretical speaking location. The aim is to challenge and disrupt more traditional readings and exemplify how alternative paradigms and methods of interpretations can lead to different theological accounts of the female subject. With the second reading – of Genesis 2–3 – the reading given will itself then be deconstructed, highlighting the unstable nature of interpretation.

also believes that Hampson’s rational theism or Jantzen’s philosophical pantheism might also be included in this multi-threaded category. See Carol Christ, ‘Feminist Theology as PostTraditional Thealogy’, in S.F. Parsons (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 82. 2 The material for this section and some of the following reflections on heterology can also be found in Jobling (2005).

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Of course, we could ask why such an exercise would be perceived as worthwhile in the first place. True, the biblical narratives remain religiously potent for many; however, would such individuals not be better off simply acknowledging the patriarchal origins of these texts, and writing them off as irretrievably sexist? Not, after all, the word of God, but the word of all too fallible man? For others, the text may simply be a cultural curiosity; an outdated and irrelevant piece of writing which the ethically sensitive will wish to disdain. However, such attempts to dismiss these stories ignore their pervasive status in contemporary culture, and do not do justice to those women and men for whom the Bible and theological doctrine remain religiously significant. Myths have power. However, as Irigaray says, ‘it is idle to revive old myths if we are unable to celebrate them and use them to constitute a social system, a temporal system. Is this in our power? Let us imagine that it is possible’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 81). Feminists, working from both cultural and religious frameworks, have developed numerous strategies for approaching the Bible, and patriarchal texts more generally. The feminist critic is attentive to ideologies, to points of view, to the construction and deconstruction of worldviews (both dominant and marginalized). The feminist critic considers flows of power and control, encoded cultural messages and the portrayal of female and male social and symbolic roles. The feminist critic who wishes to subvert the prevailing ideologies inscribed in the texts may seek ways to re-read, and find alternative interpretations. The goal is not to find the ‘right’ reading or the ‘best’ interpretation; it is to see if these powerful myths can be reimagined and set to work in feminist frameworks. Such an exercise may be a venture into heterology. Bataille defines this as ‘the science of what is completely other’ (Bataille, 1997, p. 159), exploring an other that cannot be reduced to the same and a difference that cannot be reduced to identity. It is an impossible science, because heteros, the other, is just what escapes the logic of identity claimed to dominate western metaphysics. Furthermore, its point is not to transform the unknown into the known but to return the known to the unknown. Applied to textual readings, heterologous interpretation exploits the shiftiness of the reading process, its destabilising moments. What textual moments are ambivalent? What values, ideologies or symbolic forms are repressed and abject, and which appropriated? The other is thus exposed, through its apparent absence in text and interpretation; in this manner a footnote of erasure is inserted into any claim to have discovered the meaning of a text. Of course for a feminist interpreter, heteros, the other, is multiply coded. On the one hand, feminism points to the construction of Woman as Other, that which patriarchal systems repress and eject while nevertheless requiring for their own existence. Then again, recent philosophies emphasize the positive value of otherness: Levinas is amongst those who celebrate the other as that which excites the ethical impulse. And Irigaray’s project is to open up spaces for the other woman, femaleness which emerges into subjectivity within its own divine horizons and not the patriarchal economy of the same. For Irigaray, woman as subject remains to be, and can only emerge outside of phallogocentricism in a landscape where differences and multiplicity may flourish. This, then, would be a heterologous subjectivity. Could such a subjectivity be constructed in and through Christian narratives? Let us

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turn now, then, to the first of my interpretative examples – based upon a reading of the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Christ. Reading Female Subjectivity through the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ The beloved woman sinks into the abyss, founders in a night more primeval than the night, or finds herself dispersed in the shards of a broken mirror … (Irigaray, 1993, p. 194).

As has already been intimated, feminist theory suggests that, in patriarchal systems, women are ejected into abjectness; it is not possible to speak as a female subject because the ‘feminine’ and feminine desire remain unthought. Irigaray, in particular, has emphasized the connection between the lack of a ‘feminine’ divine horizon and the possibility of female subjectivity. A state of dereliction for the female subject ensues through the absence of a divine ‘mirror’ for female becoming. In what follows I shall relate Christian accounts of the divine to female becoming, with particular reference to the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. This is to consider in mythopoetic terms the valence of the Christological drama for female theological identity. I will then go on to examine the enduring difficulty of how the masculine Christ-figure, even located within a feminist imaginary, can fulfil Irigaray’s call for a feminine divine as mirror for the becoming female subject. At the outset, however, the issue of Christ’s masculinity is bracketed, and the focus is rather upon the narrative sequence of the passion and its aftermath, its theological framing, and its relevance to a theology of the becoming female subject. In the passion of Christ, followed by the resurrection and ascension, I suggest we have a divine model that mirrors the positions and aspirations of women as subjects. A major issue for feminist theory is how, if women are ejected as abject in patriarchal systems, they can ever enter into the symbolic order as female subjects. The Christological drama could be read as providing a theological symbol-story of redeemed identity; on this premise, the contours of the story allow for women to write themselves into that redemption of identity, because it is rich with symbolisms resonating with accounts of female identity under patriarchy. Thus in the quest for female becoming, a woman may imagine herself as Christ, and the image of the divine. So let us begin now with the first in this theological sequence: the crucifixion 1. The Crucifixion But doesn’t the male lover keep asking the beloved woman to efface an original wound of which she would be the bearer? The suffering of an open body …’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 201).

The crucifixion is the paradigmatic wound at the centre of Christian theology. It is also a ‘stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 3.3). In some eyes it is a symbol, not of loving sacrifice, but of a sadism at the very roots of

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Christianity.3 Alison Jasper, for example, discerns the trace of an erotic dynamic of domination within Gospel accounts of the crucifixion which one can readily see to be troublesome for the feminist interpreter. On this reading, the theology of the cross glamorizes pain and suffering and invests it with divine beneficence; indeed, it might appear to legitimate suffering as obedience to the divine will, and suggest a religious demand to take up one’s cross in silence and even thankfulness. Feminists (amongst others) typically reject this sanctification of suffering. Furthermore, Jasper sees in the crucifixion accounts a further symbolism antithetical to feminist worldviews: namely, she sees the crucifixion as symptomatic of the expendability of the body in traditional Christian thought (Jasper, 1998). These are serious complaints. One should think carefully before accepting the ethicality of anyone, including God, brutalizing either their own self or someone else in the name of a greater good. What theologically should we make of a central symbol of the Christian faith embodying suffering and brutality – and this as an expression of the love of God for humanity? What is that telling us about the acceptability, or even desirability, of suffering as a religious trope and (more profoundly) lived reality? About the ultimate insignificance of the flesh? About the most profound love being expressed through passive acceptance of pain? Of course, valorization of sadistic practices is indeed to be deplored. Nevertheless, the symbolism of Christ crucified, and the erotic undertones in the abuse of his body, could actually suggest a Christological identity for women whose flesh is sexually objectified and even abused. Alternative theologies of the crucifixion emphasize not that humanity is called to suffer in Christ, but that God chose to suffer with humanity in an act of divine solidarity. Furthermore, we should not forget that many people take strength from the sufferings of Christ in helping them to bear their own hardships. This is akin to the argument of womanist writer M. Shawn Copeland, who writes of Black slaves singing spirituals: If the makers of the spirituals glorified in singing of the cross of Jesus, it was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed suffering. Rather, the enslaved Africans sang because they saw in the rugged wooden planks One who had endured what was their daily portion. (Copeland, 1996, p. 150)

Still, one would wish to sound a note of caution: as Wendy Farley argues, it is not radical suffering that brings redemption – but it is through resistance to it that tragedy can be transcended (Farley, 1990). On this account, suffering is not a ‘good’ in itself, but demands a relocation of theology to speak from the wounds of history in solidarity with the oppressed. James Cone has argued that the suffering of Christ ‘liberated the oppressed to fight against suffering while not being determined by it’ (Cone, 1977, p. 161). Tina Beattie argues for a feminist rereading of the crucifixion which emphasizes the role of Mary as told in the Gospel of John. She points especially to the symbolic association of the blood and water flowing from Christ’s side with the fluids of 3 It is recognized that theologies of the cross are many and complex, and a number of theologies not specifically feminist or liberationist would likewise reject accounts apparently sanctifying suffering.

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childbirth,4 and to the dying Christ’s restoration of her maternal role as mother of the beloved disciple in the Gospel of John (Jn 19:26). According to Beattie: The salvation of women’s embodiment is made real by the participation of Mary in the events of the cross reminding us that the blood of the incarnation is shed for the world in birth as well as in death. The anguish of mother and son on Calvary lays before us the terrible reality of sacrificial violence . . . But the symbolism of the cross also promises us that at the moment of Christ’s death we are born into a new maternal community, the Church, bound together not by sacrifice and violence but by love, forgiveness and reconciliation. (Beattie, 1996)

It could also be argued that if the story stopped with the crucifixion, the identification with Christological suffering would indeed trap women and others of the oppressed into divinely sanctioned perpetual abuse. However, the story does not stop there. If we read of the crucifixion in isolation from the resurrection and ascension, then we are not able to understand it within the context of the drama of redemption. In this broader context, the theology of the crucifixion need not be seen to provide divine approval for suffering as a spiritual practice or as necessary to acts of love, or to promote bodily denigration. Redemption offers hope for subject becoming. Rather than seeing crucifixion and suffering as a necessary moment en route to resurrection, we can see resurrection as a condemnation of the fact of suffering, and a vision of future hope.5 2. The Tomb A residue left over by the set up of representation: she lives in death (Irigaray, 1991, p. 91).

If crucifixion (negatively) can represent on the one hand women’s bodily denigration, material abuses and objectification, the tomb can represent on the other hand women’s place in the symbolic order. For Irigaray, women’s status is one of ‘living death’, shrouded in obscurity at the margins of patriarchy. From the classical stock of myths, this is Antigone: speaking from beyond the tomb.

4 Beattie cites here the work of Janet M. Soskice. See for example Janet M. Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement: Reflections on Jesus and the Symbolics of Sex’, in D. Kendall SJ. and S.T. Davis (eds), The Convergence of Theology (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2001). This sort of interpretation in fact runs counter to that of Irigaray. Irigaray sees the Annunciation as a prior sacrifice to that of the Crucifixion, with Mary’s assent symbolizing the murder of the mother. This has the effect of dividing women from divinity. See Luce Irigaray ‘Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order’, in M. Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 5 Nor should we forget that acts of love and the risks of love might indeed entail suffering, as might striving for justice. Those are different things from seeking to suffer as a religious end in itself, and offering our pain to God as a holy sacrifice. This last, indeed, is one of Irigaray’s concerns with sacrificial elements in religion, which she believes to be fundamentally patriarchal; Irigaray would prefer to privilege fecundity.

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Death: in patriarchal structures death is almost entirely negatively cast. It is to be feared, and overcome. In Lacanian analysis, the death drives operate on the logic of either-you-or-me, and foster aggressive relations between self and other. Irigaray relates this to the male as image of God. In order to reproduce God as One, male selfidentity reduces all otherness to itself; death drives must be resisted as threatening to that identity, and where possible displaced onto the female. Indeed, so significant is preoccupation with death in patriarchal socio-symbolism that Grace Jantzen seeks to undermine patriarchy by setting a symbolic of natality in opposition to what she labels the ‘masculinist necrophilic imaginary’ (Jantzen, 1998, p. 29). By contrast, Pamela Sue Anderson seeks to reconstitute ‘death’ as a creative and destructive force in the formation of the female subject: The philosophical imaginary is broken open by the symbolic death of the male subject; this death opens onto female becoming … As learned from Hegel’s dialectic, both domination and enslavement are modalities of death in life. Previously man’s fear of death has been projected onto woman. But once the master sees death in domination, he will come to recognize his own fragility, facing the disruption of his former privilege. However, until her refusal of enslavement, she remains the object, the one predicated as the other … (Anderson, 1998, p. 239)

We could then see death as a constructive power as well as intimately entwined with violence, exclusions and sacrifice. The ‘tomb’ may function as a ‘womb’. Furthermore, if Irigaray and Kristeva are right, it is precisely the maternal which is cast out and repressed in the patriarchal symbolic. Thus maternity and death become aligned forces, operating in tandem as pressures on patriarchal systems, which seek to exclude them, and yet which are thoroughly dependent upon them. The stone of the tomb may be rolled away; abject subjects may arise to new life. Indeed, one could argue that it is in the death of the male subject as currently constituted that the patriarchal philosophical imaginary is broken upon. It is this death of the male subject that might open onto both female and male becoming in a different socio-symbolic order. Christ’s occupation of the crypt, opening onto resurrection and ascension, can represent this death to the old symbolic order; can represent an abandonment of the tomb of patriarchy; the rise of the ‘new heaven and earth’; and its embrace within the heart of the divine. 3. The Resurrection and Ascension [M]emory of the flesh as the place of approach means ethical fidelity to the incarnation. To destroy it is to risk the suppression of alterity, both the Gods and others. Thereby dissolving any possibility of access to transcendence. (Irigaray, 1993, p. 217).

From the tomb, the resurrected subject: Christ in glory. This is a glory of the flesh, for it is the body that is resurrected, and it is the resurrected body that ascends to be enfolded within the divine. Christianity’s pathological relationship with sexuality has all too often led to the suppression of both women and bodiliness. One of the key theological elements in the bodily resurrection and ascension is that divine incarnation is not a temporary

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expedient, but a real manifestation of the divinising of flesh: thus disrupting a severance between transcendence and immanence and providing a theological context for the sensible transcendence of the subject. In this way, the female subject can be theologically affirmed and fleshiness restored to the realms of the sacred. Thus I have suggested that there are elective affinities between Christological discourses and a theology of the becoming female subject. The female subject in her Christ-likeness is abject, outcast and oppressed: but the tomb is a place not only of sterility but also of fecundity. The resurrection of Christ from the tomb offers both critique of her living death in patriarchy and a divine symbol of hope: she will rise, in flesh and in glory. The divinity of the Christ figure offers women a divine horizon in which to become: a divinity which begins in abjection and is then transformed. This is a mirror for becoming which does not simply reflect back the female subject in her captivity to patriarchal structures, but offers her a vision of this transformed state. Yet at the same time, if Christ can offer a divine horizon for becoming, he cannot offer a feminine one. For Irigaray this is crucial. Can the masculinity of Christ ever function anything but oppressively in a religion almost monolithically masculine in its divine symbolism? The Masculinity of Christ One must still, then, tackle the question of how a masculine figure, even located within a feminist imaginary, can fulfill Irigaray’s call for a feminine divine. My response to this is two-fold. Firstly, in isolation, it cannot. If only or predominantly masculine images are considered appropriate to represent the divine, then the phallogocentric order remains in place. Therefore my reflections here are supplementary to feminist attempts to centralize female and feminine imagery in accounts of the Christian God. Secondly, though, there is no reason why – within a feminist imaginary committed to equality between the sexes – a masculine figure cannot function positively for women. For such feminisms, it is within a patriarchal imaginary that maleness is oppressive to femaleness. The supposition that masculine models are not necessarily antithetical to women’s interests rests on a particular understanding of subjectivity. ‘Women’ and ‘men’ on this understanding are permeable and heterogeneous categories. The landscape of identity is dynamic; it is not fixed or stable. Thus multiplicity and plurality are fundamental to our identities. At the same time, however fluid our identities may be, our bodiliness is the horizon of our becoming. Bodiliness is also, of course, dynamic: but the materiality of bodiliness and sexuality requires integrating rather than suppressing in any conception of subjectivity. Feminism thus needs to negotiate complex terrain: for there is a suspicion that theorizing subjectivity from the sexed body returns one to essentialism. And yet, feminism is also thoroughly committed to recovering bodiliness as central to our being. In my view, however, the hesitation in theorizing subjectivity from within the context of the sexed body is based on a false understanding of the relationship between the body and subjectivity. It is unnecessary to suppose that a particular identity follows from a particular bodiliness (an essentialist view) – but rather space

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can, indeed must, be left for a particular bodiliness to shape identity in particular ways.6 On the current socio-symbolic order, such shaping occurs within the dominant phallogocentric system. However, if one relocates the debate into a non-essentialist feminist imaginary constituted by plurality and differences, the relationship between bodies male or female and subjectivity changes. In turn, this alters the nature of the debate about what kind of divine horizon a woman needs in order to become. Furthermore, there are many axes of subjectivity besides that of gender. At this point, I take leave of Irigaray, who prioritizes sexual difference as originary. Within an equitable symbolic order, gender would not remain a primary modality in terms of relations of power. It would rather represent one aspect of relations of love. The masculinity of Christ would have no more universal significance than factors such as his age, class or race. As such there is no reason why a masculine figure could not offer women resources for a reconstruction of female subjectivity in divine horizons. Therefore, the masculinity of Christ could be seen as an insuperable problem for feminists within a patriarchal framework, but need not remain entirely so from a feminist perspective of the kind I have outlined. Indeed, one can go further than this, and argue that some masculine symbols may be necessary for a divine mirror for female becoming. A divine mirror which reflected self only as same would actually risk returning us to a monological symbolic order. Melissa Raphael considers this to be the risk of Goddess feminism: that a parthogenic cosmology ensues which both suppresses difference, and transcendentalizes sexuality (Raphael, 1998). Contra this, for women, Christ ascendant enfolds difference and otherness into the Godhead. On this understanding, the masculinity of Christ in a phallogocentric economy is as much a problem for men, who are hence impoverished with respect to resources for escape from the prison of unitary self-identity imposed by patriarchy. As I have already indicated, this recovering of the masculinity of Christ for feminism rests on the assumption that women, and men, do also need female images of the divine that are not counted as marginal, subordinate or lesser. Without such, our conception of the divine is impoverished through dislocation from a rich stock of potentially evocative female metaphors and imagery. Our image of the female is impoverished also, through being denied association with the divine. But the masculinity of Christ does not in itself preclude Christological imagery and discourses from functioning positively and imaginatively in feminist theologies of female becoming. What is more, the divine should not be reduced to masculinity, nor to any other index of human identity. If humanity is in the image of God, what do we see in the mirror? I suggest that if humanity is in the image of God, it is not a mirror we see, but a divine hall of mirrors, into which we are invited to enter. Here we can apprehend otherness: but never control or absorb it. Within this hall, the sacrality of women is reflected in the divinity of Christ, who returns this transcendence to our flesh

6 I have argued this at somewhat more length in J’annine Jobling, Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Theological Context: Restless Readings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), Chapter 5.

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in relations of loving exchange. And thus, the female subject can ascend from the abyss: embodied and sacred. The Construction of the Female Subject in Genesis 2–3 Genesis 2–3 is one of the founding myths of western culture. However, this tale of our beginnings, of ‘Adam and Eve’, has been subject to intense feminist criticism. This is on grounds that it projects woman as secondary to man – at the very least subordinate, if not actually inferior; that it portrays woman as dependent on man for her existence, created not just from him but for him; that it sets woman up as the means by which sin and death enter into the world; and as the New Testament would have it, women should refrain from teaching, from authority over men, and remain silent (1 Tim. 1–14). Thus we see the establishment of an ontology of gender which has been used to support the differential social, religious and economic status of women. This is reinforced by the account of the so-called Fall in Genesis 3. Whether this text is viewed as religious scripture or as cultural artifact, can a feminist approach Genesis 2–3 as anything but a myth bolstering and legitimating patriarchal systems? So let us attempt to read Genesis 2–3 other-wise (and then, other-wise again; as stated earlier, the reading offered will then in its turn be dismantled). At the outset, I identified my quest as heterological: in search of the ‘other’. One could argue that Genesis 2–3 is in fact a narrative which does not permit otherness to appear. This reading would suggest that in the creation story, the woman is ultimately absorbed into male personhood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Upon her creation, she has no (articulated) desire; she has no voice. Her brief emergence into subjectivity in Genesis 2–3 leads to disaster and is speedily repressed. Ever forth, her desire shall be for her husband, who shall rule over her, and she shall bear the consequences of her actions in her own body with the multiplication of pain in childbirth. Irigaray argues: ‘But historically, in Genesis, the feminine has no conception. She is figured as being born from man’s envelope, with God as midwife’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 93). Is, then, Genesis 2–3 a lost cause from a feminist point of view, as a text which lends itself most readily to interpretations thoroughly antithetical to women’s interests? I now wish to suggest that alternative literary analyses may open up some different intriguing possibilities and ways of reading. Feminist literary theory has paid significant attention to mode of discourse – drawing on the work of both Cixous and Irigaray in their development of the concept of l’écriture féminine or le parler femme. Such writing would emerge from the female body and a woman’s libidinal economy. This is the quest for the female subject to speak ‘as a woman’, rather than as positioned in linguistic structures oriented around the phallus.7

7 This is both advancing and critiquing Lacan’s psychoanalytic description of entry into the Symbolic, and becoming a linguistic subject; however, because the Symbolic signifying system is anchored in the Phallus, women and men are positioned unequally in language. Woman’s position is based on Lack, or Absence; thus she finds herself on the margins of the Symbolic order.

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A key issue is whether or not expression fosters the articulation of feminine desire and subjectivity. A distinction is made between the narrative mode and the lyric mode. As explained by Honor McKitrick Wallace, narrative is associated with masculinity, with desire transmuting into narrative action in linear and teleological manner. This association of desire and action with masculinity renders narrative suspect (Wallace, 2000),8 and it is suggested that it cannot express feminine desire. In contrast to narrative is the lyric or poetic mode. This expresses a timelessness related to female bodies and feminine desire. It is connected to Kristeva’s notion of ‘women’s time’; this operates in two modalities, repetition and eternity. The repetition modality is marked by cyclicity, gestation and biological rhythm; it ‘occasions vertiginous vision and unnameable jouissance’ in its regularity and unity with cosmic time. In the eternity modality, time is ‘all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space’. By contrast, men’s time is the time of history. It is linear, and it is teleological (Kristeva, 1986, p. 191). Lyric desire can thus be deemed to emanate from the pre-Oedipal, before the insertion of the subject into the linearity of history and narrative imposed in the current Symbolic Order. At this point, female subjectivity is disallowed, because subjectivity as female remains unthought. Wallace (2000) summarizes: ‘On the one hand, then, we have narrative, committed to linear time and informed by masculine desire; on the other hand, we have the lyric, committed to timelessness and eternity, and informed by jouissance.’ As discourses, the lyric and narrative modes are of course interdependent, but the lyric can be deployed in feminist writing to subvert and interrupt the linearity of narrative by evoking a timelessness associated with feminine desire. Of particular note at this point is the association of the lyric with a prelapsarian, Edenic state, apparently timeless and unbounded, utopic and innocent – thus ethically superior.9 This lyric space is womb-like and evokes a state prior to entry into the world and Law of the Father. From this Edenic state follows a Fall – but this fall is into narrative, interrupting the lyric mode and generating forward action. One readily sees how this maps onto Genesis 2–3 and abstractly appears to offer a validation of feminine subjectivity by associating it with the state of grace prior to the putative Fall. On this telling, the world went awry precisely through entry into the phallogocentric economy and the feminine mode is rendered paradisic. There are however a number of issues which disrupt the fruitfulness of such an interpretation. The first set of these problematize the link between feminine desire and the preOedipal state. Setting aside the hypothetical nature of this connection, there is a risk that the female subject in such a construct becomes infantilized; in the mother–child dyad of the pre-Oedipal, is female desire expressed as a wish to remain a child? Furthermore, the dreaming innocence of the Edenic state ignores the requirement of investment in social and economic structures in order that needs are met. Wallace 8 Wallace here also makes reference to the work of Brooks (1984). 9 Wallace cites Susan Stanford Friedman’s analysis: Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Lyric Subversion of Narrative in Women’s Writing: Virgina Woolf and the Tyranny of Plot’, in J. Phelan (ed.), Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989).

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(2000) notes that ‘cyclical repetition and perpetually met needs map eerily well onto the domestic situation’ as produced by the privatization of the family in the processes of modernization within western culture. And thus the lyric state may be one of entrapment, precluding the emergence of both agency and subjectivity. When we turn to the text, the problematic is intensified. For if the lyric state is supposed to create space for the expression of feminine desire, this is exactly what is missing in Genesis 2.18–24. Femaleness, voiceless, is mapped onto the male body and as a response to male need. She is absorbed into the masculine subject: again, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. Indeed, the whole episode could be theorized as matricide on the grand scale – embodying both the suppression of myths of the Mother Goddess and the deposition of the human mother as source of human life. This is significant. For Irigaray, ‘the whole of our western culture is based upon the murder of the mother. The man-god-father killed the mother in order to take power’ (Irigaray, 1991). There is hence an urgent need to resymbolize the maternal, and the mother–daughter relationship. It is for this reason that Kristeva emphasizes the maternal rather than paternal function in the development of subjectivity;10 she argues that maternal regulation precedes the Law of the Father. The maternal body then operates between nature and culture, between the semiotic and the symbolic. And yet we do not have adequate discourses of the maternal; Kristeva also identifies the abjection of the maternal as a key factor in the development of depressive sexuality in women, who both must commit matricide in order to become independent as subjects and enter into the Symbolic order, and cannot do so because of identification with the maternal body (Kristeva, 1989). It may seem that Genesis 2–3 cannot offer a reclamation of maternal genealogy. If we want to associate the prelapsarian state with the feminine mode of the lyric, writings of and from the female body in these texts seem markedly absent. Furthermore, one could argue that it is in fact the transition into linear time which actually marks the development of the female as subject. In Genesis 3, the woman identifies a desire: for wisdom, for the fruit which was attractive and looked good to eat. Thus she ate of the fruit, and gave it to her husband, who also ate. This is an announcement of desire and a translation into forward-moving action: narrativity. If this is the case, however, the phallogocentric economy rapidly reasserts itself. It is typical for the articulation of feminine desire in conventional narrative to be coded as unpermissible, that which leads to madness or death. Here, expulsion from the garden and inevitable mortality result. The independence of the female subject is curtailed; her desire will be for her husband, who will rule over her. The man is punished also – for he listened to his wife. Interestingly, there is a textual echo here in the succumbing of Cain to sin in Genesis 4 – like the female, sin will desire him, and he will overcome it. And the female in Genesis 2–3 is ejected into abjectness. Do these criticisms mean, then, that the project has failed? Is it, after all, not possible to read Genesis 2–3 in ways more fruitful for the feminist interpreter – at least on the basis of the limited range of literary approaches examined? Actually, that is not my point. Rather, I wish to emphasize the very slipperiness of these texts as 10 Kristeva does not equate maternity necessarily with the female; she speaks of it in terms of function.

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the real point at which feminist interventions can be made. The very act of rereading is transgressive; it reveals different facets of the texts and highlights their inherent tensions and contradictions. With Genesis 2–3, I would contend that it is those very tensions which render singular and monolithic interpretations profoundly flawed, and point us in the direction of more creative reconfigurations. Kristeva identifies ‘the abject’ as that which has to be expelled for identity to be possible, and for her the maternal is the most profoundly abject of all. Yet the repressed returns: and it is in abject spaces that the excluded maternal can begin to break up the coherence of a text. This is where textual sense breaks down and is prey to ambiguity or incoherence. This indeed is David Jobling’s comment on Genesis 2–3: that, riddled with tensions and ambiguities, we see here the patriarchal mindset tying itself in knots ‘trying to account for woman and femaleness in a way which both makes sense and supports patriarchal assumptions’ (Jobling, 1986, pp. 42–3). Thus, it is the very failure of Genesis 2–3 to produce consistent readings which enables its disruption. Mieke Bal, likewise, favours an interpretation based on tensions, which she locates in the function of the myth as legitimation: ‘The burden of domination is hard to bear. Dominators have, first, to establish their position, then to safeguard it. Subsequently, they must make both the dominated and themselves believe in it . . . Traces of the painful process of gaining control can therefore be perceived in those very myths’ (Bal, 1987, p. 110). Reconfigured readings can undercut the dominance of established ways of interpreting texts and thereby demonstrate their fragility. This mimetically undermines the ideological codes inscribed therein through the exploitation of aporia, difficulties and inconsistencies in textual interpretation. Bal reads the text in a different key from the usual creation and fall model and is interested in development of character and the subject as site of tensions; more particularly, the female subject who ‘has been repressed or made guilty of all that did not fit’ (Bal, 1987, p. 5). With regard to the story of Eve, Bal believes it possible to defend a reading that implies neither Eve’s secondary existence nor her temptation. But her reading is not, she claims, presented as a better reading, a master reading. Its intention is to undercut the dominance of established ways of interpreting particular texts and thus to demonstrate their precariousness. Her interests lie more with the poetics of dominance per se: ‘the attractiveness of coherence and authority in culture that I see as the source, rather than the consequence, of sexism’ (p. 3). Therefore she presses forward difference as a means of deconstructing the androcentricity of prevailing interpretations. Bal’s emphasis is on the need to explode the ‘realist fallacy’ (p. 4). Realist representation works powerfully in the perpetuation of values; myth is another form of realist representation through its positing of what is as what has always been; myth defends the interests of the dominating groups whilst wrapped in its false mantles of sacred origin and permanence (p. 4ff.). Similarly, J. Cheryl Exum advocates a plurality of interpretations coupled with both recognition and celebration of contradictory readings. Her own strategy is to ‘disrupt some of the cultural and ideological codes in selected biblical narratives in order to construct feminist (sub)versions of them’ (Exum, 1993, p. 11). The interpretative history of Genesis 2–3 demonstrates only too well both how meaning changes and that meaning is not innocent. Bal suggests that the point to the

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story is creation by differentiation, ‘of humanity, of character’; how poignant that the differentiation into difference (the abject Other) has been so often perceived as the ‘point’. The step from difference to subordination is small and for many it has been only too congenial a step to take. Conclusion We might conclude that, at best, the question of whether a positive identity for women can be found in the myths I have considered remains vexed. Yet such destabilizations are of value to feminist communities as reading differently, against the grain of dominant discourses. This, then, becomes an act of resisting reading. The opposition between a hermeneutic of redemption (reclaiming biblical texts as congruent with feminist worldviews) and a hermeneutic of suspicion (treating the bible as a document thoroughly infected with patriarchal grammar) can be perceived as false. Both can be moments in a hermeneutic of destabilization, which irrupts from the very shiftiness of the interpretative process. The notion of texts having fixed meanings is refuted; destabilization can indeed be related to Derridaean différance, in which meaning is differed and deferred, never coming to closure. The possibility of reading otherwise casts the prevailing ideological inscriptions in texts and interpretations into sharp relief, and tells of the non-absoluteness of any given interpretation. Thus interpretation can be seen to be a profoundly unstable enterprise, providing an opening for feminist interpreters deliberately to exploit the precariousness of interpretative foundations and to shake free readings which rock prevailing cultural grammars.11 This enables reconfiguration, which can as noted be deployed as a form of mimesis. Irigaray has developed this as a strategy. ‘The passage,’ she states, ‘from one era to the next cannot be made simply by negating what already exists’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 24). Mimesis then becomes the means by which the economy of the same is subverted. It is a disruptive imitation: ‘To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 144). Irigaray thus aims to transgress prefigured ideologies through reconfiguration. On this point, as Pamela Sue Anderson notes, one must still face the question of the origin of the impetus for reconfiguration according to a new economy, since we are so enmeshed in the existing one (Anderson, 1998, p. 146). And it is here that we return to another dimension to heterologous interpretation. This is where the material conditions of real subjects enter into the picture as funding the desire for transformative action. Reconfigurations emerge from, and are answerable to, discursive communities. Feminist reading communities might then deploy the model of the American Quilt to describe the constructions of their religious stories. In the American Quilt model, there is a creative stitching together of stories and narratives. It includes the

11 See also J’annine Jobling, Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Theological Context: Restless Readings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 112–15; 135–41.

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memories and symbols which have most potent meaning for the community. It is the telling of one’s own story, and the story of one’s community. With respect to texts projecting patriarchal ideologies, feminists need to read differently, against the grain. Such a model of interpretation refutes the notion of ‘fixed meaning’ in texts, because textual valence is located in discursive communities, who can tell their own stories in telling the story of God. These are acts of resisting reading, while yet locating oneself in the trajectory of the community of women under patriarchy through acts of narrative remembrance and solidarity. Such readings use imagination as a resource with which the world might be re-envisaged; it is creativity which enables us to transcend our current limitations. Transcendence in this sense is the possibility of transformation. Feminists can create from the patchwork of the Bible and theological discourses their own quilts, telling their story, its pains and its triumphs and its hopes, in the intertwining of God’s story with their own. Community, and being in community, is an important aspect of feminist accounts of ‘otherness’. It can be related to a theology of love. According to Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘Love does not transfigure finitude, and it does not carry out its transubstantiation in infinity … Love cuts across finitude, always from the other to the other, which never returns to the same … Love offers finitude in its truth; it is finitude’s dazzling presentation’ (Nancy 1991, p. 99). Identity in difference is a condition for love; and love makes life unsafe. To love is to risk; this can become transformational. Indeed for Levinas, it is a relationship of desire which breaches the totality of being. And so one may leave the closed world of the garden and enter into the infinite multiplicity and plurality of finitude. In this entry into unconfined heterogeneity and fecundity, the self’s desire to return to self is breached; and the time of the other can be inaugurated. This fecund time is not only a fecundity of birth and regeneration. It is a time when reconfiguration can be imagined; a time when the envelope of the Symbolic can be torn apart by the irrepressible and always excessive drives preceding and underlying figuration. As Irigaray suggests, it opens up the possibility of the production of a new age of thought, the creation of a new poetics through the survival and struggles of the oppressed and forgotten (Irigaray, 1993, p. 5). Can we then Fall again – into a new fecundity, heterologously constituted? Or alternatively, can we at last ascend – from the abyss of dereliction into the fullness of subjectivity? Let us imagine that it is possible …

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Chapter 7

The Bi/girl Writings: From Feminist Theology to Queer Theologies Marcella Althaus-Reid

Nobody defines you better than your enemy. Alfredo Moffatt, the Argentinian psychotherapist of the oppressed told the following story. In his youth he had been depressed by his difficult relationship with a central authoritative body of psychoanalysts in Argentina, which eventually succeeded in expelling him. Moffatt was doing some innovative work in a Buenos Aires asylum, more on the line of Paulo Freire than Freud, when he heard that his work was considered to be ‘a group of drunkards, made up of marginal people (petty thieves and prostitutes) under the leadership of some messianic psychopath’. (Moffatt, 2000, p. 1). To help him in his despair, Enrique Pichón Riviere, the founder of social psychotherapy in Argentina, commented: ‘What they say about you is right. Nobody defines you better than your enemy’ (Moffatt, 2000, p. 1). And he explained that excessive, gratuitous love (Moffatt at this time worked on a voluntary basis) is a form of ‘emotional promiscuity’ that goes outside the boundaries of love-profit in this society. Happiness and freedom are usually associated with alcohol, and the happiness of the lunatic people was perceived as drunkenness. Finally, Pichón Riviere explained that people who work with marginalized people are usually perceived as marginalized themselves. There is no neutrality of roles here, and that includes the term ‘messianism’. Only a messianic figure, such as Moffatt, could have pulled together thirty students to work daily on a voluntary basis for the welfare of a group of poor patients in a lunatic asylum. Let us suppose now that Pichón Riviere was right and that nobody defines us better than our enemies, in the sense that their definitions, even if negative, are suggestive. Queer theologians are not gathering together as teams to undertake voluntary work in lunatic asylums – at least not yet – but their work is no less controversial. There are no theological societies with such legal status that they could expel us. However, churches can take action and, on occasion, book reviews on queer theology have been censored. Queer theologians by definition belong to the margins of theology in more than one sense. They work in a theology which is not part of the theological establishment. At the same time their chosen subject of sexuality is marginalized from theology in general. In the case of indecent theology, the theological option has been for an extreme marginalized subject, almost a ‘dammed’ subject. Such is the privileging of the S/M practitioner, the poor transvestite, the de Sade reader or the promiscuous, ‘out of the closet’ heterosexual subject.

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From the perspective of definitions, queer theologies are the most indefinable of the theologies. However, those who would like symbolically (or not) to excommunicate any queer theology from the tenets of ‘serious theology’ and ‘serious feminist theologies’ have a great deal to say. Disconcertingly, queer theologies have been criticized from opposite ends of the spectrum, from historical liberation theologians to conservative evangelicals. Historical liberationists (those who have not advanced in their liberation theologies since the seventies) see sexuality as an issue of the theological bourgeoisie. The historical feminist liberationists (comprising mostly North Atlantic women liberationists) have not even yet completely come to terms with gender issues beyond the equality paradigm. For them sexuality tends to be seen as a frivolous distraction from issues of social justice and women’s rights in the Church. In a sense they see queer theologies as a luxury which only privileged women in academia can only afford to pursue. At the other end of the theological spectrum conservative evangelicals view queer theologies as a source and consequence of all the evils and corruption in society. For them, queer theologies also fulfil the end time prophecies about the final judgement of the Church. Consider for instance the website Biblestudy.org, which belongs to a conservative evangelical body that mixes ‘old time gospel’ with US patriotism and the submission of women. This is an educational Christian internet site which offers free books and videos on themes such as ‘Is the USA mentioned in the Bible?’ or ‘Where does America gets its power?’ Browsing through a section on this site dedicated to answering questions from believers on themes of Bible and church life uncovers a section entitled ‘What is Indecent Theology?’ Biblestudy.org’s answer to this question provides us with conservative evangelical definitions of a queer theology. Indecent theology is defined as a combination of ‘left-wing theological views’ such as liberation theology, queer theory, post Marxism and post-colonialism, aimed to attack sexual morality and gender/sex roles. The conclusion of the site is the following: (I)f one doesn’t believe in the Bible as having authority, then anything goes sexually or in gender roles. But if the Bible was literally inspired by God, then no amount of human reasoning can evade the reasoning of Paul concerning wives obeying their husbands, etc …1 (Snow, 2004, p. 1; their italics)

The answer continues, expanding the view that feminists are ‘at war’ not only with the Scriptures but also with biology, provoking a crisis in society. This happens because women’s nature is one of a given passivity, which has made them suitable to work at home or in schools to fulfil the mission of educating children, especially to develop children’s own gendered identities as biblically ordered. Any deviance from that, and whole nations fall into chaos. This in any case, is the very intention of ‘left wing’ theologies. This term, as used in Biblestudy.org, continues the rhetoric of the Cold War to demonize enemies of conservative liberalism. Returning to Pichón Riviere, is it true that the ‘enemy’ is right by defining indecent theology as a queer theology in such a way? I would say, yes.

1 To read the full argument, see http://www.biblestudy.org/question/indtheo.html

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I believe that the authors of Biblestudy.org are right in the sense that they somehow know what is at stake. They see the issue here for indecent theology (or any queer theology) as one of disobedience to sacralized authorities, such as the Bible or marriage contracts. They see women in a different relation with their partners and they perceive a theology which encourages a confusion of gender identity roles. This primal disobedience by women is seen also as carrying consequences for society and political life. I could not agree more with that. What these ‘enemies’ are saying is true. The search for an alternative society based on principles of peace and justice requires a radical theology that can allow alternative thinking and alternative structural organization to come about. Indecent theology sees an immediate link between structures of international oppression and heterosexual thinking in terms of hierarchical thought, ideological inflexibility and suppression of diversity. Queer theologies interrogate much more than sexuality: sexual epistemologies are seen as the foundation of current political and economic systems that have generated the external debt and trade agreements which produce hunger and oppression. However, there are other kinds of criticism of queer theology which come from queer studies themselves. Many academics2 wonder if queer theory can ever mix with religion and especially with Christianity. Thus on the one side there are Christians who think that queer studies offend Christianity, while on the other side there is the suspicion that a too close association with Christianity will contaminate queer studies. Therefore at times queer theology seems to be at odds with everything else, with queer theory just as much as with conservative and classical liberation theologies. At any rate, queer theology seems an incongruent and impossible discipline: its ‘enemies’ have defined it well. Sadly, when historical liberationists see queer theologians as part of a privileged bourgeoisie they are assuming that sexual options and sexual identities have become the luxury of the few who can afford them, not of the many who need them. It shows how far sexuality is from the justice agenda of liberation theologies. If the poor cannot question their sexual identity because that would be to go beyond the approved list of issues drawn up by historical liberationists, that is equivalent to saying that to queer our faith lives is a necessary act of conscientization and empowerment. This is something that liberationists should have known from their own praxis of transformation. Calling queer theology a distraction only points to the long detour towards social justice that queer theology proposes, which involves addressing profound changes required in structural sin. However, conservatives are also right when they say that indecent theology (as a form of Latin American liberation queer theology) is not respectful of authorities and yes, it is a disorder. But it is a disordering of ideologies such as the sexual ideologies which conservatives use in their political claims. Finally, the ‘no location’ of queer theology between theology and queer theory is symptomatic of the site of revelation that queer theology has come to represent, that is, the in-betweenness of a liminal theology the aim of which is to continue to speak about God, beyond the closures produced by the heterosexual epistemology of 2 I have also heard this criticism from S/M people who do not want to be part of any ‘spiritual reflection’, although there are S/M communities, which do reflect in their own sense of spirituality.

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western discourses. Yes, the ‘enemies’ of queer theologies have spoken, and spoken well. Indecent Theology Let us now take the notion of queer ‘in-betweenness’ as a site of theological revelation. The journey from feminist theologies to queer theologies or to indecent theologies is not one of progression but of disruption. Queer theologies are not the ‘natural consequence’ of feminist thinking but an option related to a different understanding of a theological trajectory and a different aim. In-betweenness here is so much a place of identity as a transition, which does not need to be a consequence of a previous specific praxis. In-betweness is a becoming. In considering this in more detail we focus on an aspect of the work of Gilles Deleuze which has been important in my own reflections on indecent theology, specifically his conceptualization of the idea of ‘becoming’. For Deleuze,3 there is a fundamental difference between a process in the sense of a natural continuation or evolution of ideas and the understanding of ideas in movement. Instead of a natural process, Deleuze is thinking here about ideas in a context of continuous challenge, without a necessary link of continuation but of rupture, which he calls ‘becoming’. ‘Becoming’ represents an independent theological praxis, not a contestational one. Here we may find an important clue to understand the rupture between feminist and queer, since feminist theologies have traditionally seemed to imply the continuation of a process of evolution from a patriarchal ideological interpretation of Christianity. That is, feminist theologies assumed an unveiling process of Patriarchal Christianity by using different, feminist perspectives. According to Elizabeth Stuart, even Gay and Lesbian theologies may have suffered from this modern understanding of a progressive unveiling of truth syndrome, by which it is required to work with rather than to depart from a paradigm.4 In that sense, feminist theologies should be considered as a response to Patriarchal Christianity that unfortunately tried to produce liberation by maintaining a degree of epistemological subordination. In that sense, feminist theologies of the first wave did not journey without a map. This point is not entirely new. This travelling with a map by feminists and Christians has been considered and argued against by many women since the seventies, such as first wave radicals like Mary Daly or Daphne Hampson. However, this epistemological subordination was never restricted to the North Atlantic scene. Feminist liberationists from the Third World have also fallen into the trap of theological ‘continuations’ by somehow subordinating women’s theological praxis to the liberationist epistemology which included gender issues in the Church in 3 For this point see for instance Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘He Stuttered’, in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (New York/London: Routledge, 1994). Also Dorothea Olkowsky’s essay ‘Body, Knowledge and Becoming Woman. Morpho Logic in Deleuze and Irigaray’, in Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: EUP, 2000). 4 For the full argument see Elizabeth Stuart, Gay and Lesbian Theologies: Repetitions with Critical Difference (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

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a general discourse on justice. However, to have an ‘evolved theology’ also has advantages. For instance, it may favour some forms of agency, as when feminist theology becomes incorporated into a bigger pool of justice-based theologies. But this is at the cost of limiting a sense of creation that should be central to justice. For it is the law that fixes discourses and produces evolutionary thought, but not justice, which is related to epistemological extensions and new understandings. If becoming (as opposed to process) is not a praxis fixed (married) to an ideal, then we will have a quite different understanding of feminism and theology. We will be considering here a queer theological praxis which by definition has the instability of a becoming and not the certainty of an arrival. The revelation of the divine and the revelation of becoming women then connect to each other, making of any queer theology a truly theological poiesis where meaning is to be found in the in-betweenness of becoming and not subordinate to a given question. Theological Identity The point is that there is tension in feminist theologies that is to be found in theology as in feminism. Theology as such has no identity. Theological identity needs to be devised in opposition to a usually negative pole, such as a demonized Otherness, a perceived lack or even an excess. There is no theological project without a sense of opposition and women’s bodies have historically been the sustainers of the negative dialectics of theology. Patriarchal theology has obtained its identity by defining itself in opposition to the perceived excess of women’s bodies, from sin as pollution to the incarnation mystery and the Eucharist. Patriarchal theology is theology done on women’s backs, on a reversal of ‘becoming’ women. The lack of this givenness in theological identity became obvious with genitive theologies (or ‘theologies of …’). Genitive theologies are indicators of the need of theology to be identified in relation to a second reference. For instance, an identity to be formed in opposition to economics, or art or ecology. Feminist theology develops as part of a double lack of identity, the one from feminism and the one from theology. Claire Colebrook’s comments on this are useful. The unstable identity of feminism is manifested in its need to be developed in a relation which has been political, for instance feminist Marxism or liberal feminism, or in relation to a philosophical ethos, such as feminism and the enlightenment or post-modernism.5 What I should like to argue here is that instead of finding a supplement in terms of stabilizing feminist and theological identities (or reinforcing both) a queer theology does the opposite. It is precisely the role of queer theology to reinforce the existent instability of both feminism and theology, and is that instability which needs to be celebrated as the poiesis or creative force sautéing theological praxis. This is where queer theologies enter the scene of feminist theologies as a disruption and not a continuation. It could of course 5 See Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’, in Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory, p. 11 ff. For a good discussion on bodies and issues of identity and spirituality see Lisa Isherwood, ‘Fucking Straight and the Gospel of Radical Equality’, in Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Sexual Theologian (London: T&T Clark, 2005), pp. 47–58.

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be argued that queer theory, even against itself, can become a form of stabilization in theology, a form of fixity in a permanent disorder. In this way queer theology would be another way of finding an identity for feminist theology, but only up to a point. If queer theology remains stubborn, not attempting to resolve the instability of both theology and feminism, the only ‘fixity’ is the temporary, momentous revelations of new meaning in the in-betweenness of the discovery of a becoming theology. Indecent Theology My own queer project of ‘indecenting’ theology has been an attempt to destabilize the complexity of theology, feminism and identity when it relates to native women and to open doors to doing a feminist Latin American liberation theology. That indecent theology has been called ‘left wing’ by evangelicals after the end of the cold war reminds us that radical theologies are still identified with the search for alternative political praxis. That is particularly relevant in the Latin American context. Feminist liberation theology has not escaped the construction of subjectivity behind the unstable terms of theology, feminism and issues of identity in relation to ‘Latin American woman’. Specially, since feminist liberation theology entered its own diasporas, I have noticed with increasing anxiety how European theologians identified with the feminist liberationist praxis were contributing to ‘fix’ my own identity as part of the fixation and colonial normalization processes common to some intersection between feminism and theology. I have been at occasions when European colleagues would openly deny my Latin American identity because it did not corresponded with the one they read in the handbooks on liberation theology produced during the 1970s. Obviously if my identity could be negated as if I were not truly a Latin American, my theological concerns and my discussion of identity could also be denied as ‘non Latin American’. As I was not European, these issues were considered ‘irrelevant for European women’, and therefore I was to be included in the ontological colonial limbo to which those not fitting stereotypes are condemned.6 The fixing of colonial identities from non Latin American theologians onto the native ones is an intriguing development. Liberationists started questioning the identity of the ‘Latin American woman’ because a post-colonial query on identity was somehow part of the original project of liberation theology. Yet, theology as ‘a continuation’ tends to reinforce and not necessarily dislocate essentialism and universal constructions. Why? Because every time that an issue has been highlighted and addressed (for instance, the lack of cultural gender differences in the first wave feminist theological project), there are more stereotypes coming to the fore without 6 I am not referring only to some women theologians, but also men. During a conversation with Jurgen Moltmann and Prof. Timothy Gorringe, Moltmann told me that his wife was a different kind of feminist from me, and therefore, he could not recognize my understanding of ‘feminist theology’. He also added, with that impeccable logic which has always characterized his work, that my theology should be considered only as befitting ‘Argentinians’, as it happened that I was an ‘Argentinian’. An extraordinary comment from someone who has had such investment in Latin American liberation theology and who has taught outside Germany.

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being identified as such. The problem is in the method. The difficulties are to be found in the permanent process of feminist theology as an improved continuation of the old patriarchal project, which subordinates theology to the dynamics of fixing identities. Consequently it is not surprising that the Latin American woman identity presented by the first wave of feminist liberationists has also been subjected to a posterior fixation. A queer theology such as indecent theology can help to deconstruct the disarticulation of colonial identities in theology. In other words, indecent theology wanted to reflect on the fact that the ‘theology part’ of feminist liberation theology needed to stabilize the woman native as subject of theology in order that the theological identity could be stabilized. It is interesting to reflect here that one of the first accusations made against feminist theology in liberation theology was directed towards the apparent ‘lack of agency’ produced by introducing feminist concern in relation to the struggle of the poor. Feminism was seen as provoking the perceived destabilization of a theology, worked around a well-defined theological subject, which was, in this case, the Latin American male peasant. Freire wrote conscientization processes for male peasants; liberationists addressed their reflections to them and the Church based its liturgies around their struggles. It is true that Latin America has a major peasant population but it is equally true that (a) peasant populations are not homogenous, (b) the needs of women peasants have not been directly approached and (c) Latin America is made up not only of rural poor but of the poor in the mega cities where the extremes of wealth and deprivation can be found in great contrast. However, for a colonially minded theology, peasant identity is more manageable and conceivable, more homogenous than identities of those living in mega cities. At least it is easier to construct theologically peasant identities into some kind of stability: urban identities are more transient and transgressive. Urban poor women tend to subvert the theological place to which the poor should belong in Christian discourses, even if these are radical political discourses. Indecent theology as a queer theology engaged primarily with urban poor women, specifically urban poor women at the margins of poverty and sexuality. It has been said that, more than a postmodern theology, indecent theology is a ‘post dammed’ theology. That is what queer theology does to identity: it disarticulates even further the existing disarticulations, as, in this case, the post-colonial disarticulations which have been part somehow of the feminist liberation theology of the first wave. However, what was needed was a sense of ‘becoming’ of the Latin American woman, to deinstitutionalize her identity outside given models, so that the theological subject (women) would not work out their identities in response to or in competition with other theologies. Becoming is a queer praxis because the only way of exposing the abundance of women’s identities (in opposition to a self-contained theological identity) is to engage seriously with the sexual epistemology that is to be found at the base of feminism and theology.

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Bi/girl Writings Let us further consider this notion of becoming in queer theology. On this point, Deleuze has made clear the quality of rupture (I should say tearing) instead of a notion of procession. But Deleuze uses an interesting concept, that of the ‘becoming woman’ as the key ontological and epistemological moment, not in relation to feminism, but in relation to human praxis. What Deleuze is saying is that becomings always begin with women. Woman is the agent of epistemological and ontological becomings. Man, as an epistemological category, is a closed thought devoid of possibilities of transcendence. Since for Deleuze all becomings can come to pass only by women, this puts women in an almost messianic position. Liberationists would say that salvation is a gift bestowed to a lack, and only those whose fulfilment is denied can, through their lack, become agents for other people’s salvation. Theologically we can think of such messianic women becoming something at the base of a primordial subversion of gender identities in the New Testament in a queer way. The ‘femininity’ of the Virgin Mary is an essentialization of male identities. The malehood of the Virgin Mary may have been given by the enclosure pattern7 of virginity, while the femininity of Jesus may come from the flexibility and sense of mobility of his messianic project. Alternatively, it may be that Jesus is constructed in a becoming style. What Mary may lack, according to this reading, is girlhood. For Deleuze, this is a key concept. ‘The girl’ is here to be considered as the becoming of the becoming woman, and of all becomings. The girl is, as a concept, the embodiment of the transition found in the movement of passing through and not arriving. I find that, in queer theology, the girl is an important concept. The girl helps us to see how things work theologically, instead of using the established ‘woman’ category (as a finality). Through it we can find meaning, for instance, in Christian dogmatics. The question is then what can the girl do in queer theology as an open identity that is not a contestation? The girl8 basically can disobey an interpretative behavioural policy, by providing more of a Deleuzian ‘inhabitation’ of theological readings than an interpretative one. If revelation comes in the in-betweenness of transitions, the girl is then a place of revelations. However, the Deleuzian becoming woman needs to be considered more from a queer transition if we are going to dispose of continuations, which are usually heterosexual continuations. In this sense, we may like to queer ‘becomings’ considering some of the following issues such as: 1. A woman has more than one point of becoming. The girl may be one, but menopause is other. Moreover, menopause may be even more crucial as it is 7 One of the titles given in the invocations to the name of the Virgin Mary is ‘locked garden’ and ‘fountain sealed’ which have been taken from Song of Songs 4:12. 8 Alice Walker’s first definition of ‘womanist’ contrasts the daughter and the mother, the girl and the woman, the becoming woman who resists inherited rules and imposed roles and the resigned woman who has accepted the identity she has been given. And yet in the tension and criticism of the girl by the woman there is also a hint of admiration and encouragement. ‘Go get ‘em girl!’ Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: The Women’s Press, 1984), p. xi.

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uncharted territory for most women, and posits specific theological questions, for instance in relation to creationism. It is extraordinary that the first wave of feminist theologians who have long ago passed their fifties have never seriously considered the menopause as a plateau for a theological dialogue, when menopause is a major destabilizer on issues of identity and perceptions of the sacred. Feminist theologies have been trapped in their body theological reflections, but a woman’s body has many sites of resistance. 2. The girl needs to become the bi/girl. Not ‘coming out’, as is the case with the lesbian, bi, drag or transsexual, but going through the transition, not defining her own sexual identity with respect to a centred definition of heterosexual hegemony. 3. Further, the girl needs to become a theological writing strategy. In this sense, the bi/girl needs to write queer theology as a transition, which could also be a drag art. Writing the Queer (indecent) Body Let us take forward this last point, the writing theology as the bi/girl, which could be one of the major contributions that queer theology might make to feminist theologies. Feminist theologies have not produced a different writing style. The thematic has been different, and that has led feminist theologies to include the use of story telling as a way of grounding theological reflections on women’s experiences. The testimonio9 is an acknowledged narrative style that comes from voices at the margins and has been called a post-colonial intervention, outside the authorized theological discourses. But feminist theology has been developed as part of a system of colonial patronage. The mere existence of this theology is permitted, recognized or deauthorized and undervalued by an ethos of church and academic colonial endorsement. Using a colonial model here is useful but the voices of women, similar to the voices of natives, have always been unrecognized and undervalued by theology as an institution of patriarchal power based on gender, sex, race and class assumptions. Systems of patronage also work by somehow monitoring the ways in which theologies develop and feminist theologies have suffered from that in terms of expectations of their subscription to academic rigour, formal logic and styles of argumentation. The fact is that the voice of the theologian in feminist theology cannot be constructed in any significantly different way from patriarchal theology, if this theology is to be according recognition. I acknowledge that Third World feminist theologies and womanist theology also conform to this model, not due to their thematics or their use of narrative testimonial, but rather because they too lack an attempt at a feminine writing in theology. This leads us to reflect on queer theology as a genre in relation to its own possibilities of agency. Could queer theology lead us into strategies of action for social

9 Testimonio (testimony) refers here to the Latin American tradition of sharing their personal experiences in a form of prayer and as part of a liturgical act.

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transformation or is it merely a discursive exercise? There are two issues to consider here. First, which are the textual strategies used by feminist theologies in terms of the construction of the reader as an activist. Second, the strategic repositioning of agency as part of a process of fixation of theological identity. The reader-believer of feminist theologies has become a unified subject. There has been much debate and discussion during the first wave of reflections on feminism and theology in terms of challenging the essentialism of the definition of woman. There are, for example, Latin American women challenging definitions from the United States of cultural identity. But there are also Black Americans challenging writers from the United States and Latin America concerning racial theological assumptions on womanhood. However, by challenging identity essentialism, feminist theologians have also challenged the strategy of unifying the woman reader in a common construction of identity for the purpose of social action. That is to say, behind any position on women’s identity construction in feminist theologies (for instance, Black, Africa, Latin American, Latina, US, European or Aborigine) there is a struggle that has been also essentialized, or at least, prioritized. Because of this, feminist theologies become relevant in their own contextual constituencies, but not necessarily in active solidarity with each other. The unification of the conceptualization of women is in reality a similar project to the unification of the identification of the struggle. Unifications, as we saw earlier, are part of the strategic movement of theology in order to acquire an identity. The advantages of this strategy are evident. As a feminist theology unified its reader-believers in concepts such as ‘the Latinas’, then ‘the struggle of Latinas’ becomes a well-defined praxis. If behind the Latinas’ struggle there is a credible methodology such as, for instance, the ethnocentrism of the Mujeristas, it is easy to see that some strategies for social transformation can be identified and targeted. This has been the argument that liberation theologians from the first wave used to discredit what was then an incipient Latin American feminist theology. Their argument was based on the need to have a well-defined theological subject in order to have a clear understanding of the struggle, and therefore to be able to develop the right strategies for action. To add ‘women’ as a distinctive subject to the liberationist generic concept of ‘the poor’ was thought of as a distraction and an obstacle. In fact it was thought that the struggle for liberation in Latin America was going to be diluted by specifying the issue of women. What we are saying here is that somehow feminist theologies, following a modern paradigm of progress and achievement, appropriated this argument from liberationists but reorganized it according to their own needs. Thus, Argentinian women may have been writing about women’s human rights in their country while Peruvian women dealt with their issue of ethnicity and poverty. Black Americans reflected on the slavery of their past, but this did not create links of solidarity and dialogic exchanges with Brazilians, who are also Black and are descended from African women who were likewise subjected to slavery. In reality, the unification of subjects in theology results in the unification of projects that by definition need to exclude other subjects and other projects. That is, they construct their identities by opposition. I am not saying of course that those particular communities cannot be very effective in identifying and localizing relevant theological praxis. But the results are uneven. Argentinian theologians may have worked in the field of

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women’s human rights, but without considering the human rights of transvestites or bisexuals. Moreover, the construction of one theological identity and one unified struggle sometimes conflicts with other projects. In queer theology the lack of interest in unifying the theological subject has worried theologians and activists alike. If we cannot define the ‘queer subject’ (otherwise it would not be queer) how can we then define the struggle and unify a reader-believer through a textual strategy of self-identification? Moreover, queer theology as a genre tends to behave in a different way from other feminist writing. It behaves according to ‘the bi/girl’ of Deleuzian strategies. We have already noted that feminist theologies have not been written differently. There has been no any attempt at an criture feminine in feminist theologies, except in some sexual theologies where the difference of the themes and theological subject have pushed the writing of theology to more experimental writing forms. But this is the queer element in theology which destabilizes theological writing. To start with, queer theologies partake of a semi self-confessional art, written in the first person by a theologian who somehow comes out in what she says. But in bi/girl becoming, queer theologies never allow concepts and experiences to settle: reflections are perhaps bridges to the different ideas which have been excluded in theology and are still unexpected. I have claimed elsewhere that queer theology plays (or flirts) with the reader in a camp manner. The reader becomes destabilized because there is no clear gender or sexual inscription to guide her through the reading. In other words, the text queers the reader, making her a participant in a different textual world. Metaphorically, queer theology paints the toenails of believers: readers leave their identity formation in suspense and do not receive clear guidance towards a new formation. The result is sometimes deeply offensive. After all, not everyone would like to get his or her toenails painted deep purple by a bi/girl when reading theology. It is in the midst of this theological disorganization, which lies at the core of queer and indecent theologies, that the struggle can become struggles, in plural. As queer paradigms do not work by opposition but by differentiation, struggles are identified and multiply but not in an oppositional pattern. The ‘solidarity of the excluded’, as in a film by Almodovar, opens up the possibility of a more effective theological praxis of solidarity in which justice can be the only agreement. Strategies are multiple, spanning the Carnival against Capitalism, the AIDS campaign of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the soup kitchens set up by transvestites in Buenos Aires. Rody Humano, the first transvestite elected as representative in the regional council of Tucumán, one of the poorest areas of Buenos Aires, declares herself to be a devoted Catholic who donates her salary to poor communities in her region. Rody is a long-standing activist who was strongly supported and elected by a Catholic and poor constituency who were able to see that solidarity and social justice also entail sexual justice. The point is that in the actual political process of globalization, alternative praxis means queer praxis. In order to challenge ‘the imaginary of a cultural future’ (Hannerz p. 87) closely linked to an economical homogenized vision, what is needed, in a real sense, is disjuncture and not continuation. Finally, we could also consider the power

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of queer solidarity which represents the knowledge and experience of the excluded in actions of transformations. As a Conclusion When the globalization crisis in Argentina became so severe that every school and every neighbourhood ran a soup kitchen, Lohana Berkins led a project of a soup kitchen organised by transvestites. As poor people came to the soup kitchen, they found themselves served and looked after by the solidarity of a group of transvestites, one of the most marginalized groups of sexual dissidents in Argentina. As they all sat together to share their meals, queers and heterosexuals who previously considered that they had little in common now discovered that they shared poverty, suffering and a community of solidarity with those who supported them. And this is my final reflection: the soup kitchen of the transvestites became a Eucharistic gathering and a symbol of the presence of God in the midst of those who serve others, in spite of the fact that we are all living somehow under exclusions. I understand that those people, as they sat together, began to understand each other better. Sexual differences were no longer experienced as threatening, but on the contrary as a necessary part of community building. This is a queer example of how a theological praxis based on difference produces loving-solidarity. The necessity of fixing other people’s identity before producing a praxis of social transformation is unveiled as an urban myth of contextual theologies. The common struggle for bread and justice do not exclude other people’s struggles. Rather they can reunite them, or at least allow them to coexist with much sympathy. In this, the bi/girl of the becoming of a Deleuzian theology is present, rewriting the sense of possibility in theology that characterizes queer and indecent theologies alike. And in this, instead of producing theologies of subordination of evolution, we may find ourselves doing theologies of rupture. And it is in the in-betweenness of these ruptures that the possibility of rediscovering the presence of a queer, different God amongst us emerges. Thus theology can speak of God without repeating God, and women can talk of women’s struggles while allowing other women and other struggles to challenge us with their sense of dissidence and political alternatives.

Chapter 8

Our Lady of Perpetual Succour: Mother of Phallic Fetishes? [Queering the Queen of Heaven] Lisa Isherwood

Queer theology offers many challenges to the tight theological boundaries of orthodoxy and causes some shock waves even in more liberal surroundings. It does this because it is unafraid to ask the awkward questions and pose the unlikely readings as a way to, at the very least, move the edges of the debate. These unlikely readings spring from the use of diverse and often surprising hermeneutical convergences. The Virgin Mary has not been the subject of much queer theology, which is strange since the whole notion of a virgin mother is in itself a rather queer idea, one which could yield significant challenges to orthodoxy. She has, of course, been the subject of feminist theological discussion and indecent theology has considered her place within its destabilizing tradition. She is undoubtedly a rich source for political theology having been ascribed the Magnificat, a manifesto for social upheaval as radical as any ever written. So the young Jewish mother has been used in a variety of often contradictory ways. She has been used as a weapon against women by the conservative element of the Church which claims that passivity and purity are the roles of women who follow her example with of course the implicit understanding that women can never be virgin1 mothers and so will fail to live up to her exacting standards. At the same time the women of Latin America, for example, see her as one who mirrors their situation exactly, single mothers who have to struggle to survive and who also demand sexual lives. In their hands she becomes the strong woman whose virginity signals that she is not owned by any man, rather that she is not sexually active. There are a wide variety of ‘useable and un-useable’ Mary’s between these two respective positions, plenty then to claim an already queered Mariology with concepts like the drag Madonna of Buenos Aires Carnival2 in competition with the Star of the Sea. Here is a young women who in her manifestations from the radically political to the drag queen speaks to people and appears to be flexible enough to carry the needs of such a diverse range of people; her edges seem very permeable and flexible just as all good queer theological concepts should be. In the virgin mother of God, who becomes the co-creatrix, all patterns of normality are questioned and turned upside down, the physical, the metaphysical, the theistic 1 See Lisa Isherwood, Liberating Christ (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999). 2 See Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2001).

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hierarchies and their earthly counterparts and the gendered roles of women – aren’t they? Perhaps in all the images that we have placed before us it is possible to suggest that there is a common theme which can be identified amongst others, that of the lady who gives succour, the mother who nurtures, who gives meaning , hope and compassion to her children, even if she is a drag queen. Can even this flexible, loving mother who answers the needs of all her children in their diversity be left in place under a queer post-Christian analysis? The title of the article demonstrates that I think there are some issues to answer here and that I wish to attempt to do so through focussing on the virgin mother as a male construction springing from a primal need for nurture. Not that the need for nurture is male alone but rather that it, like all things in this world, has a gendered nature to it which lead to very different outcomes. I want to consider whether it is simply the case that we have a mother of perpetual succour who, in responding to male need for nurture, is no more than a phallic fetish, in which case what kind of mother is that? Does she simply convey the rigid backbone of the phallocentric Church and society from which she now springs? I think it is possible, if we use the concepts of the phallic mother, to open up a new and potentially dynamic way to look at Mary the mother of Jesus, to see behind some of the wishful thinking that has been accompanied by desperate constructing of masculinist theology. A theology that has had its effects on women too both as worshippers and, in this case, the worshipped. Of course should we even believe that we can find the flesh and blood Mary? Of course not; she is lost to us from the time of the early texts, we can never know who she was and so our starting point has to be modest. We can claim that she may have become the Christian carry over of the goddess Isis or the divine spirit of the great goddess herself, the chosen of the almighty male God and many other things but what we know is that she was a woman of flesh and blood, and it is here that some of the truly queer potential may have room to flourish. Tools for the Job! So what exactly do I mean by the two terms that will be used hermeneutically in this article, phallic mother and fetish? Bataille has stated the core of our desire to ‘bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain’.3 For him there is a role for the sexes in this which, while beyond them, is also grounded most centrally within their connection together. He understands the erotic to have a place in drawing those of the opposite sex towards one another for a profound purpose – that of moving beyond what he sees as the isolation of discontinuous existence and on to dissolution and mingling that places us in the realm of a profound continuity. Of course he understands the active male as the one who dissolves the female but that may be more the stuff of his male psyche than of unshakeable truth. Nevertheless he suggests that it is the phallus that enables that

3 Bataille quoted in Marcia Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother. Psychoanalysis, Modernism and the Fetish (London, Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 1.

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continuity, an assertion that has been highly contested by many scholars. Bataille declares that the erotic has a sacramental character in that it seeks after God’s love through plunging into continuity which he understands as part of the nature of the divine love.4 This blending and fusing of separate objects is for Bataille a taste of eternity; there is a death but beyond it continuity. Here we see again that his experience and so the thoughts that spring from it are extremely male with the ‘little death’ so real for men, being projected onto the wider screen of all humanity. It is within this realm of thought that the phallic mother has life; she is the grown woman with breasts and a penis, the one who holds a symbolic centre in much psychoanalytic theory and causes as much controversy as she potentially illuminates. She is every psyche’s wet dream5 because she is an archetypal object of desire, or to put it another way, she is a ‘symptom of a compulsion to resolve ambivalence by dissolving it into a spacious equivalence’.6 Or yet further she is the ‘conflation, compaction and concretion of all the most primitive fears and desires of hegemonic heterosexist white bourgeois patriarchy [home sweet home]’.7 Yes I think here we do have it; she is the object of male psychic creation and not necessarily a universal figure. In examining her then we will not find women at all but rather we will see emerging the historic construction of women as categories and will have to ask what purpose for the male psyche these categories serve. The phallic mother appears to represent a woman with absolute power who is not a monster, although she can be feared, but at the same time a woman who is reduced to perpetually giving suck and in that way she is the eternal Mother – the absolute construction of infantile male desire. The pure and perpetual lactating breast without the fear of the defining phallus, the one who in the thoughts of Bataille heals the discontinuity through the constant giving of her body, some may say through giving her essence. In this way the phallic mother, the ground of all productivity and reproductivity, stands like a screen between us and our prehistory as ‘inanimate things’, she is the beginning of our psychic, cultural and personal history.8 She seems to offer the appealing opportunity to dissolve all our troubling questions in her being. From a Freudian perspective she is the aid to a smooth path into coping with individuation and the troublesome knowledge that with the primary love object we are always in a triangular relationship – we love one who loves someone else as much and maybe more than they love us. But feminists have to ask what is being smoothed and what ‘matured’ if the phallus is not detachable from the mother. This constructed mother has a phallus where an umbilicus9 should be – a rigid organ of meaning in place of a flaccid life-rich aid to becoming, the cutting of which sets the process of individuation on its inevitable way, the maintaining of which stifles the life it so easily and powerfully sustains. This phallic mother is essential to the maintenance 4 Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars, 1990), p. 17. 5 Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 1. 6 Ibid., p. 6. 7 Ibid., p. 7. 8 Ibid., p. 13. 9 The umbilical cord being the only truly universal organ of connection – why then does it not figure more in psychoanalysis. See ibid., pp. 34–5.

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of phallocentric culture and she is above all, we need to realize, a tragic construction of motherhood. Indeed a tragic construction of womanhood, because in her phallic state she denies that real sexual difference actually exists and makes a difference; such bodily reality is neatly reconfigured in this lactating ejaculating answer to all our prayers. Indeed, she is the ANSWER. The reason for the hermeneutical use of fetish in this paper will I hope also become clear as I believe it helps throw more light on the way in which the mother of Jesus may have been used by the tradition. According to Krafft-Ebing, all men are fetishists; any man who prefers one shape to another or breasts over thighs is a physiological fetishist and this is seen as healthy as it is part of the process of individualism.10 However even this process can reach such a level as to appear like worship of holy objects with no romantic element to it at all – in other words a complete objectification for self gratification based on lack of human relationality. In my view the worst, but quite common, type of religious devotion. Krafft-Ebing would not himself believe that this level is pathological or perverse; for him this comes later when the sexual interest strays from the breast to the idea of the breasts, which is when the real is replaced by an idea or symbol of the real. The further one strays towards the ideal then the more perverse one is. For extreme fetishists even the loveliest reality always remains inferior to the image they have made of it. It seems to me we live in a world of pathological theological fetishists where there is excessive belief in the symbols we make and a desire to take them as literal! Along with the lingerie fetishists we no longer caress the symbol to remember the wearer but rather to enjoy in private the avoidance of making contact of any kind with the actual reality. Like him we reduce through ‘lustful substitution’11 any real embodiment and deal in imaginative associations which only have meaning in our heads. Marx understood the fetish as a species of idealization which ought to signal something material but which instead masquerades as that reality, pretends that it is something in itself, and so becomes an autonomous signifier rather than a guide to reality.12 I would like to suggest that the mother of Jesus has under the weight of theological invention and the projection of male desire become the phallic mother, yet further she has become the fetishized phallic mother – even one step removed from the phallic mother alone. She is far removed from the real woman she once was and has become the lactating breast even, it could be argued, in the liberation interpretations of her. After all, as I mentioned at the beginning, even when she is the drag Madonna she answers the needs of her children and gives them suck. She is a fetish object, removed as Krafft-Ebing notes from real flesh and blood into a constructed abstract idea and, worse still, an idealized idea – one that can never be satisfied by any kind of reality. Of course, as the phallic mother the mother of Jesus has a much more pernicious role; this model of womanhood actually carries within her the seeds of phallocentric Church and society, not just the lactating breast but the ejaculating patriarch in drag. Her children hold on to her rigid phallus not knowing that their 10 Ibid., p. 51. 11 Ibid., p. 54. 12 Ibid., p. 84.

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origin and their becoming actually lie in an umbilical reality which is richer but much less certain and far more enfleshed. I think that Bataille may be right that we struggle with the reality of discontinuity and long for continuity and through it some kind of sense of being. It may also be that the ‘mother’ is a significant figure in this continued struggle but it seems to me that the creation of the phallic mother, be she religious, political of psychic, is a false move. This mother who is the lactating breast for our disquiet does not ground us in any reality at all. Indeed she herself is easily removed to another realm of unreality, unable to offer much or to provide leadership. In these circumstances what is the queer thing to do? Well as always it is a return to the enfleshed questions, a re-examination of how we may think differently. With the virgin mother of God this may involve allowing ourselves to see beyond the lactating breast to the pleasureseeking woman, giving back to the virgin the sexual pleasure and erotic power that has been so thoroughly colonized by male desire in the construction of her. She is the good mother who fucks and takes pleasure for herself. How can this be achieved when there is so much male contentment invested in the construction as we now have it? I think we have to take a few steps back to Bataille’s original concern if we are to deconstruct this particular piece of theological invention and remove it from the mother of male concern, the phallic, and worse still the illusionary, removed mother of the fetish. This idealized and abstracted woman who has no life of her own and, I wish to argue, can therefore offer no real life to women. Feeling for the Virgin’s Flesh Haunani-Kay Trask offers an interesting understanding of what Bataille is experiencing as the need for continuity; using her theories we may be able to suggest that he is hoping for no more than the ‘return to the mother’, that is, the deep remembering of the primal love felt through physical closeness with the mother.13 In itself there is no problem with this assertion; after all, if this is a human need and as theologians we operate within an understanding of incarnation as radical then human needs do indeed lead us to a deeper communion with the divine. Scholars such as Dinnerstein have suggested that the inevitable loss of the primary love, the mother, is the most basic human grief which is compensated for in an array of healthy and unhealthy activities throughout our lives. If this is the case then theology and religious practice has a place here, making visible the grief and healing the wounds that we may all live fuller and less destructive lives – more abundant, more fully incarnate. The virgin mother then may be the person who can focus all her love on us and heal all our longings. She loves others but is not particularly connected to any other, there is no triangulation of affection to deal with here, thus soothing one of the basic diseases of our early loving and nurturing experiences – we do not have to share! The problem is of course that the loss, however it is felt, is experienced differently by boys and

13 Haunani-Kay Trask, Eros and Power. The Promise of Feminist Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 71.

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girls, leading to a desire for distinct compensations all played out in a gendered and heavily patriarchal world. So while Bataille may speak eloquently about dissolving the separate entity that is female through erotic engagement, there is another side to the story and that is female. Both men and women wish to experience again the nurture that was evident in the primal love but in a patriarchal world this is extremely difficult. For men it is a lot easier both physically and psychologically; a woman’s body is like that of the mother and so just being close will enable men to recreate the closeness of the early years and awaken memories of infant–mother bliss. For men, then, intercourse will satisfy their need for nurturance but this is not the case for women. After all, merely being close to a man will not remind a woman of her mother’s body; in addition she is cast into the mother role by being the one to provide bodily pleasure. The exchange of pleasure that would signal a mature relationship is often absent within heteropatriarchy.14 As a woman can not, usually, penetrate a man, the emotional merging signalled by such an activity is difficult without vicarious merging. It is this vicarious merging that is so dangerous for women who through their capacity to give nurturance and care lose their autonomy. Men, under patriarchy, are able to find nurture and remain autonomous while women’s capacity to love will often lead to a life of emotional pain and a yearning for idealized love as well as frustration when this is not attained.15 So we see that with all his fine words and ideas Bataille has missed the point for women. The temporary undoing of the self, the shattering of subjectiveness, does appear to serve the male and at first glance does not serve the female who has this experience daily and so does not need to learn it as the fullness of eroticism or the pinnacle of the spiritual search. However, may it be possible that in this dissolution of the self men can learn something different and might it be that this dissolution has to take place in the presence of the divine without the mediation of a woman’s body? Or is it that they do indeed need the phallic mother since the threat of the woman with a phallus may counter the tendency to languish, with little attempt at mature relationality, in the bosom of the perpetually lactating mother? There is no doubt that there is queer potential in this undoing of the self; it could in theory turn the patriarchal order on its head. Once again we see that what may be of use to men if they engage with it relationally is of little use to women who have been captured by the universalization of narrow concepts. For Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘feminist eros projects a metaphor of the ‘life force’ developed out of the culture of women’s everyday lives: the texture, the substance of women’s realities as mothers, wives and sexual objects/victims.’16 This is of course revolutionary in a world that gives primacy to male experience and fits women in usually as a defective or certainly inferior afterthought. Aquinas is not dead even in the so-called social secular sciences and certainly not in medicine and the law. Trask believes it is only when we engage in a radical exploration of women’s flesh and blood feelings that we will begin to find resources for resistance. Unsurprisingly she, like many others, feels that women have been most affected through sexuality and 14 Ibid., p. 74. 15 Ibid., p. 80. 16 Ibid., p. xi.

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sexual institutions, and drawing on the work of Marcuse she asserts that what was originally a struggle for existence through a struggle for pleasure has become, for women, a struggle for security.17 The price is very high for those who do not comply. Sadly for women they begin to realize that their enforced vulnerability, through lack of power to define themselves and their own experience, is erotically appealing to men and so denial and self sacrifice are placed at the heart of the acceptable woman’s world. This means that under the relentless weight of patriarchal politics and religion the relation between the sexes becomes pathological, with the feminine forever masochistic and the masculine forever sadistic, with women doomed to exist as a projection of another’s fantasy. What is set in place then is an intimate connection between pleasure and injustice and this is what feminist eros sets out to break. This injustice has, in the present world, permeated all areas of life, including our own connection with ourselves. ‘Our bodies have been taken from us, mined for their natural resources [sex and children] and deliberately mystified. Five thousand years of Judeo-Christian tradition, virulent in misogyny, have helped enforce the idea that women are ‘unclean’ … our ignorance about our own primary terrain – our bodies – is in the self interest of patriarchy.’18 Deliberately using the language of post-colonial discourse, Trask brings home forcibly the situation of women within patriarchally defined institutions. Although this situation may seem clear and so one wonders why women fall for it, Trask reminds us of the power of the myths that bolster this arrangement which actually obscures the inferior position of women. I of course would wish to add the myriad theological and religious myths that in their sadomasochistic way make a defined and secondary life appear desirable and holy. Perhaps we can argue that the traditional Virgin Mary has been a disempowering myth for women while perhaps empowering men. She is the mother who has had all her passion and pleasure removed, she is the security blanket of patriarchy as her female children have become the security blanket of the male ego. Of course, at the individual devotional level we will witness a more complex picture and one that is beyond the scope of this paper to unpack. Trask does illustrate that many women are consciously and unconsciously aware of the plight they are in; she points to breakdown as being a rational response to an oppressive system when breakthrough seems impossible.19 While Trask describes the problem, she is also keen to create an alternative and for her this lies in two paths, the return to the mother and the return to the body. Both are necessary because in both the roots of patriarchy, and the denial of the female erotic that this heralds, have been planted. Within the Christian tradition this return to the mother through the construction of Mary is difficult, to say the least. Mary is conveyed as the perfect object of mother bliss for the pining sons and the impossible role model of virgin and mother for women. This return to the mother is then for women a way to look again at ‘how we dwelt in two worlds, the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons’20 and, having looked, to reimage how 17 18 19 20

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 55. Adrienne Rich, quoted p. 106.

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this may be one world of female empowerment and sisterhood. The search is on for courageous mothering that does not fall into the self-sacrificial mode required by sons and patriarchy but rather a love that, while nurturing, is a process of women giving birth to themselves, a kind of psychic midwifery for women’s transformation.21 The love that is sought is then philosophical as well as psychological and emotional, it is a conscious befriending of the female and a nurturing of that femaleness to autonomy. The nurturing of this autonomy in a world that dictates the patriarchal law that only men inherit the love of women and that women have to be taught this is deeply threatening to patriarchy and is what Trask would call the feminist eros. Can the image of the Virgin Mary carry this kind of weight, can she really befriend women in the way that Trask considers to be necessary for the empowerment of women? Can we really queer her from the phallic mother to the psychic midwife and is this what we need anyway? In a very uncharacteristic turn for a secular work, Trask engages with Robin Morgan when she calls this kind of nurturing and empowering love and the body that enables it ‘sacramental’ – an anti-Christian sacrament. After a Eucharistic celebration of the mother’s body as the true bread and wine, Morgan goes on: Blessed be my brain that I may conceive my own power Blessed be my breast That I may give sustenance to those I love Blessed be my womb That I may create what I choose to create Blessed be my knees That I may bend and not break Blessed be my feet That I may walk in the path of my highest will.22

The power of the external male Christ is replaced here in female flesh and blood, in women’s real experience, and the sacramental force of that is emphasized in order to challenge the denigration of the female body that has been the stock in trade of much traditional theology. Of course there is a strand of this power in the woman’s body that can be found in Orthodox iconography where the Virgin Mother is priest bringing forth her son from the chalice – she is the overarching figure for devotion in the icon, not ascending into heaven but grounded and grounding, bringing forth the divine in the real stuff of life. This is no bread and wine, no once-removed symbol, but real flesh and blood pictured as the Virgin’s ongoing consecration of the world – the fruit of her womb. This is the embodied and embodying mother. For Trask this return to the mother is also linked to a return to the body, which may seem a foolish step since women have been erotically linked to the body for centuries, only to the body, and this has acted against us. However, the erotic is an activity of the mind and not just the body and is the way in which we may have the greatest revolution; to claim back what has for so long been taken away and 21 Ibid., p. 109. 22 Robin Morgan, Lady of the Beasts (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 87–8.

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used against us is a tremendous challenge to the dominant system. As Trask puts it, ‘the return to the mother and the return to the body are consciously taken journeys destined to weaken the power of the sexual under-structure and to make vivid the reexperiencing of instinctual gratification. In turn, these journeys enable the projection of an emancipated society: the feminist eros.’23 The return to the enfleshed mother is then in Christian terms an embrace of life in abundance through the removal of the rigid prescriptions of the phallic mother in her fetishized form. A lot is being claimed for feminist eros but the need to do so is clear – we have lost so much of our embodied power that we need to envisage a way of recovery. What feminist theory has done is provide a way of looking at eros that is based in the female body and female experiences and in so doing it has offered women a way of loving themselves and other women in a world which demands otherwise. The battle has been hard for our secular sisters but the problem is more complicated for Christian theologians who work within a tradition that requires that the love focus of women be a male God, or the phallic mother of his son, who in physical forms are far removed from women and who spawn a tradition that is anti-body and particularly suspicious of the female body. The founding myth tells how a woman’s connection with things embodied and physical led to the fall of man – there may be hope here for us if we reinterpret this myth! Once women connect again with things embodied, their own bodies and the erotic that powers through their very beings, then it may indeed signal the fall of man as the norm, of the crippling reality of patriarchy. Perhaps Mary can be the New Eve, the one that got away, the one that finally found release from the male storytelling. More of a Lillith then, the one who calls to her children from beyond the walls of the male enclosed paradise – we shall see. Jessica Benjamin, like many before her, acknowledges that masculinity and femininity are based on very different assumed principles and experiences and not just biological difference. She offers us further insight into the role of the Virgin Mother, although it is not her intention, through her argument, that boys lay the basis for the supremacy of the cold, impersonal nature of rationality from birth. They are not their mother and so their maleness is defined by discontinuity, the kind that Bataille spoke of when dealing with the male understanding of desire, which leads them to objectify her as an object, an instrument of pleasure, but not an independent person. This she sees as the very base of the lack of equality within the hetero system, which she understands as sexual but also political. And we may see it as the basis of the creation of the phallic mother who as a fetish object is also the crux of systems of sexuality and politics.24 Erotic domination she says is male anxiety about the relation to the mother which manifests in power over and denigration.25 In this association of women with desexualized mother object, the woman is stripped of agency in desire and viewed as empty, that is, of having no autonomy or meaning beyond that which 23 Trask, Eros and Power, p. 173. 24 Marx was one of many to claim that the creation of the fetish is crucial to the workings of advanced capitalism, whereby money stands in for other unresolved desires; it takes on an unreal life of its own. 25 Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism and the problem of domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 77.

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will be found when she is penetrated by the phallus which is the counter balance to the fear of being engulfed and devoured by the maternal. The phallus becomes the instrument of autonomy, the representation of freedom from dependency on the powerful mother. In a tradition that places celibacy so highly, the penetration by the phallus will no doubt be theological rather than physical, although I understand that the Virgin Mother is also the object of much embodied desire. This theological penetration acts, I would argue, in much the same way that physical penetration acts for the male psyche and creates much the same results, projected just as effectively into the universal unconscious where it is in danger of taking root as an absolute and unshakeable truth. When considering the Virgin Mary we can perhaps say that the penetration has been so complete that she has a phallus, but one that is not meant for her pleasure but for that of her male children. The picture becomes queerer as we progress. Women all the while have no object with which to overcome this phallic monopoly.26 This is why it is so important that women do not further cripple themselves through a removal from the reality of their bodies. The lack of recognition which Benjamin associates with the male child’s relationship with the mother and as the base of heteropatriarchal relationships has to be overcome through the prioritizing of the female body, anatomically and symbolically, in our theological worlds. The mother of God who has been given a phallus along with an eternally lactating breast is no help to women. Benjamin says an understanding of desire as a need for recognition changes our view of the erotic experience: ‘It enables us to describe a mode of representing desire unique to intersubjectivity which, in turn, offers a new perspective on women’s desire.’27 For her this intersubjectivity is spatial, it gives women room to grow, to be, and is not confined. Following Winnicott’s insights, she argues that the relationship between the self and others is spatial, it is a space that holds and a space that allows us to create.28 It is this space of course that is denied women through the rigid boundaries of hetero reality but it is the space that is crucial for the emergence of our interior self. Benjamin examines how this initial arrangement is worked out in society through the separation of the public and private spheres. This she sees as the public face of the split between the father of autonomy and the mother of dependency with the separation intensifying under the inevitable weight of rationality from the public sphere. Rationality is all that saves men from their fear of being swallowed by the maternal; it also, of course and inevitably, leads to the destruction of maternal values. It is depersonalized, abstract and calculable and neatly replaces any interaction involving personal relationships and traditional authority and belief. Benjamin points out that it makes a wonderful partner for bureaucratic systems – just like advanced capitalism! The denial of dependency is of course crucial for the bourgeois idea of individual freedom which carries with it the illusion of choice so central to the perpetuation of the multiple myths of capitalism.

26 Ibid., p. 88. 27 Ibid., p. 126. 28 Ibid., p. 128.

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Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, who demands no relationality in return as she is content to be the ever-lactating breast, carries a heavy weight if we are to take Benjamin’s suggestions to heart. The politics she has been co-opted into underpin a global genocidal reality, that of savage capitalism. As a fetish she allows for the notion that signifiers mysteriously gain autonomy and thus sustain the illusion of lack of dependency and relationality. For Marx, as we saw earlier, this is the foundation myth of capitalism. It is, in my opinion, when one sees the realities of this global economy, one that Christianity in all its forms should be standing against. It seems that, in pursuing the line of thought that I have, I have even brought into question some of my beloved liberation theology, that is to say, this mother who offers unconditional love to her children can be seen in a less than totally positive light when offered to further gender analysis. It seems that a much more real and challenging picture needs to emerge and, as with much queer theology, by starting with the lived reality we progress to a slightly clearer picture of the nature of the human/divine which is the quest of incarnational theology. It is not sufficient to remove the phallus from the psyche and theological constructions of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour; we have to give the vagina back to the virgin. In this way what we may mean by that has hope of flourishing in a more powerful and empowering way as we begin to witness through the reflections of our sisters in Latin America – she becomes a woman who is not owned but who lives in a world of relationship and relationality. In this way she stands in line with the agency of women and signals the reality of their lives, she refuses objectification through need and desire but rather claims her own desire as the authenticating essence of her role in the lives of women and men. As we have seen, such an image of the mother of Jesus will be challenging in very different ways for men and women but with luck she will champion the agency of women and challenge the lack of dependency of men. Perhaps in our return to the mother, which we may all need as a place to encourage empowerment, we will no longer find a hiding place in which the growth of a phallocentric Church and society is guaranteed.

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Chapter 9

De-colonizing the Sacred: Feminist Proposals for a Post-Christian, Post-Patriarchal Sacred Kathleen McPhillips

Religion is the way in which masculine identity is sacralised.1

Introduction Feminist engagements with discourses of the sacred – particularly in feminist studies in religion – have been largely about de-constructing the gendered dimensions of the sacred/profane dichotomy which have functioned as the central descriptive category of religiosity in the modern West. In this discourse feminism argues that the sacred has been reified as masculine and the feminine as profane. Such a dichotomy is premised on the use of binary oppositionalism which is a common rationality used in social theory and which has been documented and critiqued in detail by feminist social theorists.2 Feminist deconstructive responses to accounts of the sacred have involved two strategies. First a critical interjection into the discourse that involves a deconstruction of the rationalities used to construct a dichotomy of the sacred and a critique of the sacred as based on violent sacrifice and second, a re-location of the sacred where it can be re-imagined and re-positioned as biophillic, embodied forms of religious practice and thought. Spiritual feminisms, feminist philosophies and theologies and feminist psychoanalytic discourses have been particularly articulate in re-imagining the sacred as feminine. This essay is concerned with examining these engagements as contributions to the transposition of discourses of the sacred to a post-religious, post-Christian feminist imagination. I will argue that the re-positioning of the sacred is problematic, particularly in spiritual feminist discourse, because it maintains a dichotomy between sacred and profane even though re-defining the category of the sacred/ 1 Victoria Lee Erickson, Where Silence Speaks: Feminism, Social Theory and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 48. 2 For example, see Roslyn Bologh, Love or Greatness. Max Weber and Masculine Thinking – A Feminist Inquiry (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Erickson, Where Silence Speaks; Nancy Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’, in Sneja Gunew (ed), A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 89–106; Rosalind Ann Sydie, Natural Women, Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological Theory (England: Open University Press, 1987).

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profane to more constructive gender alliances. Leaving the dichotomy intact does not address the classification system on which this dichotomy is based and ignores other possibilities of structuration, and indeed cultural description. In particular, I will argue that psychoanalytic accounts of the sacred, particularly in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, provide a multivalent approach to expressions of religious experiences, including the sacred, by looking at religiosity within a sociopsychic formation that does not rely on belief and truth as totalizing categorical imperatives, but rather as emerging from contextualized human experience. I Foundations of the Sacred in Social Theory The association of gender with the profane is notorious.3

It is now nearly one hundred years since the French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote The Elementary Forms of Religious Life4 where he proposed the idea of religion as a foundational structure of human experience, and its elemental place in the constitution of sociality and subjectivity. This idea still very much engages feminist discourse on subjectivity and is expressed clearly by Luce Irigaray5 when she states that religion constitutes the horizon of our human potential. Indeed, recent sociological accounts of western cultures argue that post-modernity is characterized by processes of de-secularization and re-enchantment6 which involve a return to religious sensibilities and the development of new religious practices which are engaged in re-defining and re-imagining the sacred. So the place of religion in contemporary culture raises many questions, including the gendered dimensions of new or revitalized religious forms and the structure of religion in human society. Having said this, most sociological constructions of the sacred/profane are highly problematic for any account of liberative human subjectivity because they are premised on exclusionary categories and practices, where certain objects and ideas will be constituted by the sacred and others not. Feminist analyses take up these issues and begin with a critical account of Durkheim’s theory by asking: if the sacred is masculinized and legitimated through violence, can it be re-imagined and re-cast as biophillic? Is it possible to engender a sacred that can be representative of woman and of sexual difference? The importance of Durkheim’s work, especially for religious feminisms, is that he positions religion as a central structure of every society. Religious activity, largely through ritual, creates and recreates social solidarity, maintains social identity and 3 Penelope Margaret Magee, ‘Disputing the Sacred: Some Theoretical Approaches to Gender and Religion’, in Ursula King (ed.), Gender and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 109. 4 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976 [1915]). 5 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (New York: Columbia Press, 1993). 6 Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips (eds), Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment (England: Ashgate Press, 2006); David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

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reflects this back to the group as autonomous processes of belief in a divine other(s).7 The primary function of religion is to enable the emergence of conceptual thinking through the development of classificatory systems of knowledge. Religion is thus the primary social structure of any society because it creates and maintains knowledge and thought. This also means that thought is not an inherent characteristic of being human, but rather a socially acquired skill.8 In other words, religion makes it possible to think within a particular cultural environment. Durkheim argued that religion is always identified in any society by the classification of all things into two separate categories: the sacred and the profane. Social order is achieved by the on-going maintenance of this separation.9 All religious feeling and practice stem from this dichotomy. Individual feelings of awe and the recognition of the realm of the sacred emanate from the processes of socialization which nominate all social space, particular experiences, bodily expressions and physical sites as sacred or profane. The sacred/profane dichotomy then is a social construction with specific histories and cultural logistics, institutional practices, bodily observances and arrangements of space and time. For example, the Christian calendar delineates the days of the year into the feast days of saints, and the events of the Bible. Particularly important feast days require certain congregational and individual observances, and often take place within a church, which is sanctified ground. Most religious practices identify certain objects as sacred and certain bodily responses as appropriately holy. Attendance at a church liturgy involves the congregation in certain bodily posturing which signify ritualized response. This also means that there are groups of objects, bodies and places which are not sacred, as the sacred is premised on an exclusionary, binary classification system. The same rules apply to the profane as to the holy: that certain objects, bodily posturing and products, spaces and places are definitive of the non-holy. Feminist critiques of sacredness centre on the way in which gender is a central, if unacknowledged, function of social order, and where the feminine is consistently located in the profane. Victoria Lee Erickson’s10 reading of Durkheim’s account of the sacred concentrates on the way in which the classificatory system produces gendered thought, through the organization of all material and non-material realities into the two categories. The distinctiveness and force of this particular classificatory system cannot be underplayed. For example, the function of myths, stories, dogmas and beliefs is to produce a system of representations which express ‘the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers which are attributed to them or their relations with each and with profane things’.11 As Erickson12 puts it:

7 Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’, in S. Gunew (ed.), A Reader in Feminist Knowledge p. 90. 8 Ibid., p. 92. 9 Ibid., p. 90. 10 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. 48. 11 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, p. 37. 12 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. 5.

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Post-Christian Feminisms People in everyday life think about things real and ideal, and it is through religion (a set of beliefs and rites) that they categorize things (real and ideal) as sacred and profane… Religion, then, is a way of knowing and thinking about reality.

The forms of reality that are produced by such a system of classification are far reaching. Notions of time, space, ways of understanding difference, social meaning and individual identity, rely upon the on-going generation of sacredness.13 But for the sacred to exist and exert social force, there must also exist the de-sacralized realm from which identity and sociality must be protected. This realm of the de-sacralized constitutes the profane: its base function is to stand in as the antithesis of sacredness, as the necessary ‘other’ in a system of dualistic classification.14 Women’s association with the profane means that the feminine is characterized entirely by what is left after men have constituted the sacred so that ‘women and men are gendered at that point in time when the sacred and profane world come into being’.15 This understanding of the gendered nature of the sacred is re-iterated by several theorists of religion who followed Durkheim, including Freud, Otto and Eliade.16 Julia Kristeva was later to take up the question of gender in relation to her work on abjection17 where she argued that the sacred excluded the most abject of all: the mother and maternity. The patriarchal sacred is formed in large part from a series of separations and exclusions that also hide the original exclusion.18 My reading of Kristeva, however, finds that the abject is not the same as the profane; they are different concepts. Kristeva states that abjection consists of objects and states which disturb and confuse symbolic and real boundaries, and that in terms of the sacred, abjection has the power to disrupt and shake the boundaries that create and maintain the sacred. Joy comments on this: ... abject substances are those things (states and individuals) which confuse boundaries and borders, disturb divisions, and upset the margins of identity. The abject is an ambiguous non-thing (neither this nor that, both inside-outside, such as bodily fluids) which by its transitional or liminary position on the threshold calls into question the clean and clear divisions necessary for the functionality of the symbolic order … Abject elements are not abject in themselves, but abject because by their very ambiguity they endanger what Kristeva believes to be the weak boundaries of the symbolic subject.19

Kristeva argues that the abject can be utilized by the sacred to reinforce the boundaries of the sacred. But for Durkheim the sacred and profane are completely separate worlds: they have nothing in common. They cannot share time or space and one of the functions of ritual is to ensure they never meet and cause deep disruption. They 13 Ibid., p. 5. 14 Ibid., p. 12. 15 Ibid., p. 48. 16 Ibid., pp. 56–61. 17 Julia Kristeva, ‘Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection’ (selections), in Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon (eds), French Feminists on Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 95–104. 18 Joy et al, French Feminists on Religion, pp. 99–100. 19 Ibid., p. 94.

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are barely comparable. However, clearly culture spans the two worlds and people live in both, thus there are rituals for managing separation and border crossing is required constantly. Durkheim20 demonstrates that in Arunta society the initiation rites for young men involve the leaving of the profane world of the mother and the everyday, and the entering of a new sacred society where he is given a new identity and social place. Erickson21 argues that: In the Elementary Forms to be a man requires the exclusion of women from social life. By sacralising the masculine community and denigrating the feminine, men become social and women natural beings. Reread, Durkheim’s work outlines the exclusion of women from the ideal world as a given activity of social life.

Nancy Jay re-iterates this point by arguing that the positioning of the sacred and profane as a tight dichotomy between A and not-A means that there is no possibility of nuanced levels of distinction in social life.22 Pushed further, Durkheim was unable to substantiate the content or character of the sacred beyond the fact that it is defined by its complete heterogeneity to the profane. This ‘radical separation’ leads to an inevitable separation between men and women: … because women are profane in relation to men, they are, according to Durkheim, excluded from all rituals, even from knowledge about them. In fact, women are not supposed to know any of the process by which conceptual thought is formed. Over and over he refers to their exclusion. For Durkheim, the exclusion of women even provides an identifying sign to distinguish truly religious practices from those that are mere magic. Religion performs its essential function – of establishing conceptual thought – for men only.23

Recalling that conceptual thinking is made possible by religion as the force which creates the initial classification of things and people, Jay argues that ‘if the capacity for conceptual thought is not inherent in human beings, but is acquired only through participation in a process that specifically excludes women, how does it come about that women can think?’24 Read in a certain light, the work of Julia Kristeva agrees with this proposition: for her, women are excluded from the sacred because the sacred is built upon a rejection and forgetting of maternity. This rejection is the cornerstone of the sacred and is made possible by first the sacrificial scapegoating of women as the excluded other and the force or violence necessary to maintain the separation of sacred and profane. The next section considers feminist responses to the relationship between the sacrifice, violence and the sacred.

20 21 22 23 24

Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, pp. 39–41. Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. 21. Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’, p. 90. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 92.

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Sacrifice and Violence: Feminist Responses A central theme in deconstructing the patriarchal sacred recognizes that the foundation of the sacred – in both modern and pre-modern societies – rests on the idea, and practice, of violent sacrifice.25 Religious violence takes a variety of forms, both symbolic and real. Symbolically, it is embedded in expressions of the sacred/ profane as a function of that separation. This is evident in religious ritual which in mainstream Christian traditions is expressed through the Eucharist and practised by men only26. An extension of this tradition is the location of women’s bodies and particularly menstrual and childbirth blood27 as foundational expressions of the profane, whose exclusion it has been argued is a basis for violence against women; that is, culture as misogynous.28 The most public form of real sacrifice is war and societies utilize various socio-psychic technologies to justify significant loss of life via violent means. Yet there is no evidence that war as a necessary sacrifice for ‘peace’ is abating in the world.29 Feminist scholars have argued that the violence which generates the sacred – and produces the profane – is substantially and historically, masculinized.30 The force that is necessary to separate the sacred and profane generates power. Power is created by the need to maintain complete heterogeneity between the sacred and the profane. Violence – both symbolic and real – can be understood as a function of religious experience in the sense that force is a requirement for maintenance of the separation of spheres. Violence is itself religious because the force isolating the sacred from the profane lives in the minds of the believers.31 Religious power (the force of collective opinion) creates a collective force (from a membership that upholds the sacred/profane dichotomy by means of violence) used to legitimate a violent matrix of domination and subordination, clearly visible in processes which

25 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks; Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Patriarchy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Nancy Jay, ‘Sacrifice As Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’, in Clarissa Atkinson, Constance Buchanan and Margaret Miles (eds), Immaculate and Powerful (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 283–309; Melissa Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). 26 The Protestant Reformation under the leadership of Luther rejected the structure of a sacrificing priesthood on the basis that it was a re-crucifying rather than a remembrance. This does not mean that Protestantism rejected patriarchy; rather it rejected this form of religious structure (Jay, 1985, p. 303). It could also be noted that the patrilineal line of apostolic descent is reserved for heterosexual men. 27 Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 1966). 28 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks. 29 Mary Condren, ‘Melting Hearts of Stone’, in this volume. 30 Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’; Magee, ‘Disputing the Sacred: Some Theoretical Approaches to Gender and Religion’; Erickson, Where Silence Speaks; Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment; Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 31 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. 22.

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gender social life. Erickson32 argues that without this concept of sacralizing force, Durkheim would have no theory of social life: Durkheim reduced religion to collective life; yet behind religion lies the will to exclude the profane, the feminine. Religion is further reducible to exclusive groups that dominate the excluded. Religion is the mechanism through which this exclusion is ensured. Religion is what makes ‘man’.

Erickson presents an important idea here: that it is religion which is ‘the primary supporter of gender and gendered power created in the collective conscience of men’. Seen in this light, the insistence of second wave feminism that religion is essentially patriarchal and promotes violence is insightful. However, as Penny Magee33 demonstrates, secularism does not undo the relationship between the sacred and violence: indeed it tends to veil it and in doing so subtly encourages its continuation. Feminists who ignore the sacred acquiesce to the sacred/profane distinction as a totalizing, violent opposition: We must avoid setting up adversarial positions which invoke, by means of Absence, traditional metaphysical certainties. Fear of the God question, fear of ‘divine women’ and fear of their irrelevance to ‘empirical reality’ can only maintain constraints that reinforce the ideology of the sacred-profane ‘opposition’. 34

Secularization, then, is not an answer to unravelling the connection between male violence and female subordination. An example of this in terms of blood sacrifice is the social value ascribed to death in war (positive and publicly celebrated) and menstrual blood (private, polluting and requires management and containment). While secularism does not extinguish the sacred/profane categorization, it does express a de-centering of the importance of formal religion and religious rites, particularly in modernity. Durkheim (along with other social theorists such as Max Weber35 and Anthony Giddens36) argued that secularization does not necessarily mean that religion as a process of classification is lost: indeed he argues in modernity that religion and the sacred are transformed, but still visible in the need for sociality and a collective life. Erickson agrees in the sense that the sacredness of masculinity is continually reproduced as the form of ultimate human expression and certainly embedded in sacrificial expressions and rituals. The mourning rites around remembrance of death in war – which currently abound – are an excellent example. Sacrifice has several necessary ritual functions in the ongoing separation of the sacred/profane. It allows entry to the sacred; it provides for its generational transfer from one group to another; and lastly expiates any associations with the profane.37 32 Ibid., p. 23. 33 Magee, ‘Disputing the Sacred: Some Theoretical Approaches to Gender and Religion’. 34 Ibid., p. 117. 35 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 36 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 37 Joy et al, French Feminists on Religion, p. 99; Jay, ‘Sacrifice As Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’, p. 296.

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Jay argues that symbolic sacrifice is central to modern Judeo-Christian practices not necessarily as a remembrance of the crucifixion but as a statement of the exclusivity of the patrilineal order of the priesthood. For example, the function of the Eucharist is ‘recognition of the power of sacrifice as a ritual instrument for establishing and maintaining an enduring male-dominated social order’.38 Only men may perform the act of Eucharist transformation and this exclusivity is heavily protected. In Christian churches where women have Eucharist authority, their presence remains problematic and is rarely universal. Hence, the Eucharist39 is a symbolic form of blood sacrifice premised on particular gender arrangements which in turn create particular forms of social (gendered) organization. Clearly, the controversy over sacrifice in Christianity is very much alive in symbolic realms. Ecumenical discussions between Catholics and other Christian groups flounder over the issue of the Eucharist and the priestly succession rites: … the immovable barrier to sacrificing together is not theological but a concern for purity of descent … those churches demanding Episcopal ordination on the basis of the exclusive apostolic succession of the clergy are the only churches celebrating the Eucharist as Sacrifice. They still do not ordain women, with the exception of the Anglican and Episcopal churches which are internally divided on that issue just as they are internally divided on Eucharistic theology.40

Jay argues that the practice of blood sacrifice – both real and symbolic – enjoys almost extensive world wide distribution – and is characterized by patriarchal gender dimensions where there is ‘an opposition between sacrificial purity and the pollution of childbirth and a rule that only males may perform sacrificial ritual’.41 In this opposition positive social value is given to killing, mostly through war, and negative ascription to childbirth, where ‘the pollution of childbirth can only be undone, remedied by sacrifice’.42 An example of this are the laws in the monotheistic religions concerning menstrual and birth blood. Possibly the most contaminated substance, these religions all rely on rituals that first identify the substance as pollution and second allow ritual cleaning. Ritual sacrifice maintains social order by excluding women’s blood.43 Christianity is sometimes proposed as an anti-sacrificial, anti-violent religion44 where new ethics of human responsibility and love are observable in the New Testament stories. These stories interrupt the mimetic transfer of violence as contagion and suggest alternative social arrangements based on justice and mercy. Mary Condren argues that while the possibility of reading the gospels as anti-sacrificial stories are certainly present, the practice of mainstream (patriarchal) theology and 38 Jay, ‘Sacrifice As Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’, p. 304. 39 Ibid., p. 283. 40 Ibid., pp. 303–4. 41 Ibid., p. 283. 42 Ibid., p. 284. 43 Ibid., p. 300. 44 Condren, ‘Melting Hearts of Stone’; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (John Hopkins University Press, 1979).

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Church ideology has been to promote sacrifice through theologies of atonement and sin. There is also little evidence that the relationship between patriarchal Christianity (and indeed many religions) and violence is lessening with many contemporary societies engaged in local, regional and global violence legitimated through state and religious militarism.45 Feminist philosophers Luce Irigaray and Grace Jantzen argue that the relationship between man and the sacred remains fundamental to social life and to Christianity. Whether individuals have a religious practice or not, the representational field of divinity in Christianity images God as man, enabling man to see himself reflected in God. Woman has no parallel possibility other than to appeal to the Virgin Mary, a much lesser form of divinity and one whose status is dubious. Both spiritual feminism and feminist philosophy have done much to de-stabilize the relationship between sacrifice and gender and divinity and gender. For example, the rescripting of values given to menstrual and childbirth blood as positive and sacred has been a central characteristic of new forms of a post-patriarchal female sacrality. Raphael46 develops this analysis in Thealogy and Embodiment, arguing that the menstrual taboo can be subverted by re-inventing a powerful negative – but still sacred – taboo. Menstrual blood becomes a means for appreciating that this blood carries a potent charge. Spiritual feminism has also developed an understanding of menstruation and childbirth as times of spiritual expression and development. Psychoanalytic accounts of sacrifice and violence provide deep insight into contemporary collective psychic and cultural conditions. The work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray in particular consider the ways in which the sacred is constituted through language and the unconscious. Kristeva argues that the West promotes a sacrificial social order where (female) scapegoats are continually fabricated as sacrificial victims and where religion functions to provide myths and rituals that manage – but also veil – collective and individual psychic distresses and their origins.47 Kristeva’s aim, like many cultural theorists, is to ‘to demystify the hidden agendas that masquerade behind ostensibly spiritual language’ and ‘analyse the roots of social trauma that traditional religion might have sublimated, repressed, or contained’.48 The primary social trauma for Kristeva is the pain of separation from the mother’s body. She locates the origin of this pain in biblical stories and religious rituals. For example, the food taboos which are central to the Jewish dietary rites relate to an object excluded by these rules which, she says, whatever form it may take in biblical narrative, is ultimately the mother.49 This exclusion constitutes the abject and is premised on a symbolic identity that ‘presupposes the violent difference of the sexes’.50 In Kristeva’s essay Power of Horrors she locates the abject as a necessary part of religious structures. Abjection is often linked with rites of exclusion and defilement 45 46 47 48 49 50

Condren, ‘Melting Hearts of Stone’, this volume, pp. 147–8. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 170. See Condren, this volume, pp. 148–9. Ibid. Kristeva in Joy et al, French Feminists on Religion, p. 101. Ibid.

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around, for example, dietary and sexual practices. Abjection assumes the sacred, because it represents what is unacceptable and repulsed and it is also signalled by rites of purification which make abject objects acceptable.51 Abjection is not some simple logic of exclusion but ‘a violent and visceral rejection’ and is found: … not only in substances (vomit, blood, semen, faeces, pus) but also in states (disease, rotting, decay, person (criminals, the insane, the stranger) and actions (murder, incest) … For what is expelled in abjection is not the abject substance itself, but its ambivalence, its transitional identity that both repels and enthrals.52

Importantly for feminist interjections in the sacred, the abject ‘stirs the ghost of the maternal body’ (ibid) by making visible the weakest boundaries of the symbolic subject, threatening to pull the individual back to its primary attachment, the maternal body: In its very ambiguity, the abject represents the previously undifferentiated state (mother– child) that was the origin of each person, The abject this both threatens and promises a collapse of those symbolic structures which enabled a subject’s first step away from the mother towards individual identity.53

For Kristeva, western culture maintains a highly problematic relationship to the mother and where the mother does appear in Christianity – in the form of Mary – she must serve the masculinist symbolic.54 This cannot be resolved within patriarchal religion because religion is built on the disavowal of the maternal. Religion also cannot allow full subjectivity because so much of its content is not open to analysis; it is rather the subject of faith and belief. Psychoanalysis on the other hand reveals and interprets, and insists on a speaking subject.55 This is similar to Irigaray’s position that authentic religious identity must be synonymous with a speaking subject. The difference between abjection in religious ritual and in psychoanalysis is that in psychoanalysis abjection is necessary for the ‘advent of the subject as a speaking being’,56 in the sense that the infant moves away from the mother (abject) in order to become a self. However, unlike Kristeva, Irigaray57 argues that the quest for subjectivity involves women in re-claiming, or at least understanding, the ways in which patriarchy damages the mother–daughter relationship by disallowing the development of a woman’s voice, her true voice and then, a true relationship. Hence Irigaray’s comment that women’s emergence often begins with silence, where words have been forbidden and censored. This brings us to the work that feminist scholars have undertaken to re-script the sacred and the profane away from patriarchal accounts to biophillic relations and 51 Ibid., p. 99. 52 Ibid., p. 94. 53 Ibid. 54 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 198. 55 Kristeva in Joy et al, French Feminists on Religion, p. 164; see also Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 197. 56 Kristeva in Joy et al, French Feminists on Religion, p. 165. 57 Luce Irigaray, To Be Two (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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expressions and to ask the question – is religious imagination and expression always at the cost of women’s selfhood? Or should feminists move away from the sacred, which is premised on exclusion and sublimation? II Re-Scripting the Sacred … we still do not understand sufficiently what it means to ‘sacralize women’s experience’, to call women ‘sacred’, to name certain activities as women’s ‘sacred rituals’.58

Feminist scholars continue to argue that a central task of contemporary feminist scholarship is to disrupt the universality of the masculinist symbolic, and explore new imaginaries of divinity and sexual difference. Hence, feminist responses to reimagining the sacred/profane and its gendered dimensions have focused primarily on re-claiming the sacred as a positive expression for women. We might place this work within a feminist religious imaginary which has at its heart an overwhelming desire and drive for the emergence of an authentic feminine divine located as embodied and empowering. What we learn from feminist religious scholarship is that the function of (patriarchal) religion to produce collective representations for the social group has been limited to producing such representations for men and that overcoming this construction will be the continued work of the feminist religious imaginary. This section of the essay addresses representative sections of the work that has been undertaken by feminist scholars in religion to provide post-patriarchal accounts of the sacred/profane. They are strategic responses to the masculinist symbolic and involve the following: re-claiming the profane as a political space in which excluded and marginalized groups voice alternative religious expression; looking carefully again at religious ritual as the basis for a dynamic development of ethics and laws; creative uses of language to construct new gender-based religious metaphors; reimagining the relationship between religiosity and psychoanalysis with particular attention to new forms of subjectivity; and re-writing divinity to include an embodied feminine. Religion on the Margins: Embracing the Profane We start with Victoria Lee Erickson’s challenge to Durkheim’s claim that the collective religious experience is representative. She has argued above59 that ‘the sacred is gendered masculine and the profane is gendered feminine’, which carries with it an implicit understanding of violence against women: ‘Therefore … what produced “religion” was not a collective experience but a masculine one, and that what Durkheim “saw” when he looked at religion was activity produced primarily to satisfy the needs of men.’ More than this, Erickson60 argues that Durkheim 58 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. xii. 59 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, pp. 10–11. 60 Ibid., p. 49.

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fundamentally under-theorized the profane realm, by allowing the sacred to define its alterity. So although he produced a theory of sexual difference, it was one predicated on the feminine as non-masculine (and therefore non-sacred). This is the same conclusion that Luce Irigaray has come to in her analysis of the relationship between the formation of identity and gender. Beginning with Lacan’s thesis on individuation, Irigaray argues that subjectivity must be achieved – it is not simply given. And in this given identity, a young girl enters culture as lack: What Irigaray demonstrates is that the subject which Lacan and Freud describe, who achieves subjectivity and sexual maturity through the repression of competing desires in the formation of the unconscious, is male. For Freud, the feminine is defined by lack; a little girl is a little boy without a penis. Lacan speaks of woman as the ‘not all’. So it is the male for whom subjectivity is possible. Irigaray then asks: can women be subjects? Can women achieve subjectivity as women, not becoming one of the boys? Becoming who we are in our own right, rather than defined in relation to men.61

Erickson asks the same question in relation to Durkheim. Why would women want to gain access to the sacred? Is the violence at the heart of a patriarchal sacred contagious, or can it be resisted? Because while both Durkheim and Lacan can explain the lack of women’s subjectivity, they cannot explain how women can gain subjectivity, outside of a male symbolic. For both Irigaray and Erickson the starting point is silence, of where women cannot speak, or at least where their voices cannot be heard in the masculine symbolic. Irigaray argues that Freud and Lacan described women’s exclusion as silence, but failed to explore the details of this silence. Erickson argues the same about Durkheim. The question of subjectivity for women outside this cosmos is the question: neither theorist is interested in ‘women becoming subjects in the old masculinist “economy of the same”…’.62 However, Irigaray and Erickson come to different conclusions on where subjectivity might be located and the possibilities of rejuvenating the sacred. Erickson argues63 that the sacred can only ever be an exclusionary category and it is to the realm of the profane that women must turn in search of life-affirming spiritualities and justice for marginalized groups. The task of understanding this realm, its possibilities for subjectivity, its relationship to divinity, would not only enflesh the profane; it would also constitute a critique of religion as only ever belonging to the sacred. The first task is to speak into the silence that is the profane. Strategizing around this, Erickson argues64 that our capacity to appreciate the profane depends upon the development of a language that can talk about the subject matter. Popular religion and magic – characteristically inhabiting the profane – require a language with which to articulate the spiritual experiences of oppressed and marginalized peoples. It might be that ‘profane spirituality’, in the form of folk

61 62 63 64

Cited in Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 193. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 11. Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. 188. Ibid.

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religion and magic, incorporates values which feminism holds dear: co-operation, ecological sustainability, equality, mutuality, embodiment.65 A second strategy proposed by Erickson is to look to the imaginary symbolic of profane life – in art, poetry and music – for expressions of ethics and values. In this analysis, spiritual feminisms, popular culture, Goddess spiritualities, neopaganism, and many New Age practices would constitute the realm of the profane – the religion of the masses – where articulations of the conditions and experience of oppression would emanate. Indeed, casting feminist spirituality as oppositional to a hegemonic masculinized sacred has been a central strategy of feminist scholars in religion.66 Post-modernity can also be characterized as a return or revitalization of magical- and mystical-based forms of knowing, as opposed to the rationalized theologies of modernity. However, the problem with inhabiting the profane means that the masculinized sacred is left intact and possibly unchallenged, which might mean an escalation of violence and sacrificial culture. Ritual as Dynamic Basis for Social Legitimation Critical re-examination of anthropological and sociological scholarship by feminist scholars reveals that ritual as practised by traditional cultures has a dynamic fluid function in generating ethics and laws, and does not necessarily function only to manage the sacred/profane separation. It is often in the translation to western scholarship that gender is ascribed to the profane but is not inherent in the traditional cultural practice or the bodies of women. Dianne Bell’s work with central Australian Aboriginal women demonstrates that the sexual segregation around ritual practice is not necessarily founded on the sacred/profane, rather it is concerned with the system of rights and responsibilities within separate domains where sex forms the basis for a productive social division.67 Within the separate terrains, there may well be sacred/profane distinctions, but the nature of male–female relations is (as Durkheim suggested) the right ordering of social (and sexual) relations through ritual practice: It was in ritual that I found men and women clearly stating their own perceptions of their role, their relationship to the opposite sex and their relation to the Dreamtime whence all legitimate authority and power once flowed.68

Feminist anthropologists working in other cultural sites confirm Bell’s analysis that women’s rituals are devalued by western conceptions of gender and religion, and acknowledge a complex politics where the cause of women’s devaluation is certainly related to the impact of colonization and modernity.69 Indeed Seremetakis

65 Ibid., p. 192. 66 See in particular the work of Carol Christ, Naomi Goldenburg and Starhawk. 67 Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 248. 68 Ibid. 69 Julie Marcus, A World of Difference: Islam and Gender Hierarchy in Turkey (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992); Constantina Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word. Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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argues, in her ethnography of women’s mourning rituals in the small Peloponnesian state of Inner Mani, that it is the fragmenting politics of modernity that render women’s rituals (and women’s religious agency) into displaced (capitalist-driven), marginalized spheres. Although there is potential for these spheres to generate strategies and techniques of resistance,70 there is little doubt that: The penetration of modernization ideologies aggravated and intensified culturally constructed gender divisions that have been in place for some time.71

For Seremetakis72 it is the ‘poetics of the cultural periphery’ that provide a framework of analysis where a reconstitution of women’s religious agency acts against the universalizing impact of modernity by documenting the historical conditions of cultural peripheries and their relationship to global forces. Women’s ritual on the margins of the so-called centre does not necessarily indicate dependence to that centre, ‘for it is capable of denying recognition to any centre’ (ibid). Yet there is no doubt that to ‘stand in the margin is to look through it at other margins and at the so-called centre itself’.73 This is reminiscent of Erickson’s argument for a religion of the profane where the power of the margin or periphery to generate a politics of resistance and regenerating spaces is effective in accounts of women’s agency. Again, this problematically leaves the masculinist sacred intact. The Post-Patriarchal Sacred In Thealogy and Embodiment, Melissa Raphael makes a strategic and articulate case for the development and practice of a post-patriarchal sacred, which she locates mainly in thealogical discourse. She argues that it is possible to liberate the sacred from its patriarchal strictures, and the profane from the realm of otherness and negativity, and that a primary function of spiritual feminism is to encourage and enact this.74 Raphael calls this development ‘feminist immanentism’, which is a religious form not based on a binary dualism but on a dynamic interchange between the sacred and profane realms. Like Erickson, Raphael argues a case for women reclaiming their own profanity, and she locates this at the heart of a post-patriarchal sacred. She draws on Mary Daly’s work in Gyn/Ecology where ‘ … feminist profanity is the wild realm of the sacred as it was/is before being caged in the temple of Father Time. It is free time/ space … Since it is not confined within the walls of any spatial or temporal temple, it transcends the “accepted” dichotomies between the sacred and the profane.’75 A

70 71 72 73 74 75

Seremetakis, The Last Word, p. 1. Ibid., p. 221. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 39. Daly, cited in Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 40.

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central theme in the post-patriarchal sacred is of course the representation of the body, specifically women’s bodies as sacred so: The embodied immanence of the divine in women-as-goddess means that they are no longer excluded from the mediation of the sacred. A woman’s body can mark the passage or the sacred through the world in the numinosity of her experience of its continuous change: conception, birth (not only of babies), ageing or decay, death, rotting, and rebirth into non-human life forms.76

Again, the case for re-defining the profane is problematic if the opposition leaves intact the premise of religious belief and faith. On the other hand, spiritual feminism has also tended towards re-defining the sacred at the expense of ignoring the profane, which is partly unavoidable if ‘the resacralization of the whole body and its organic by-products deprives the category of the profane of much of its traditional content’.77 Re-sacralization involves redefining taboo or abject objects to incorporate them into a negative sacred so that they are understood to have a powerful charge and must be treated in particular ways and with specific precautions.78 Raphael’s argument is not to eradicate the profane but, like Nancy Jay, Claudia Seremetakis and Dianne Bell, to see the category as fluid and dynamic without a ‘predetermined reference’.79 There is a sense in which spiritual feminism encourages a weaker distinction between the sacred and profane because the female body and self is fully sacralized and all things patriarchal become profane, including the trashing of the natural world and the continuing violence against women. Raphael argues: There are, in all feminisms, two final and related moral adjudicators: the full humanity of women and the absolute value of all living things … So a feminist sacred/profane distinction does have an ethical dynamic in sacralizing the humanity of women and the value of nature, but not a moralistic one. Theology liberates the sacred from puritanical virtuousness but reinforces the religio-ethical dynamic of the distinction.80

Psychoanalytic Accounts of the Sacred The work of Grace Jantzen81 and Luce Irigaray82 provides an account of re-imagining religion and subjectivity from spiritual feminism in the sense that psychoanalysis provides a different relationship to divinity and self-hood in relation to belief. As Kristeva argues (see above), the nature of faith and belief does not necessarily allow for a full thinking and acting subject. For Irigaray, religion involves a different relationship between self and divinity, where wholeness marks the horizon towards

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Raphael, p. 41. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Jantzen, Becoming Divine. Irigaray, To Be Two and Sexes and Genealogies.

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which the self moves continually, knitting together the shards of self that were damaged in patriarchy. Jantzen says: As Irigaray reminds us, there is strategic value in rethinking religion rather than in acquiescing in an already masculinized secularism, not ‘awaiting the god passively, but bringing the god to life through us’ … Contrary to much secular feminist thought, Irigaray is clear that religion cannot just be ignored or written off: it has to be transformed because it is in the symbolic of religion, and in particular, the idea of God, that a horizon for becoming exists and makes possible, authentic human subjectivity.83

Like Raphael, Irigaray and Jantzen focus their attention on the sacred and how its dualistic hold can be undone and transformed. They recognize a need to unravel the oppositionalism which underpins and encourages the violence that is necessary in the maintenance of the sacred/profane. Like Erickson, Jantzen proposes the development of a ‘multifaceted strategy of eliciting women’s voices, listening for the silences, the lacunae, the sounds of the margins, listening not just to fathers and sons but to mothers and daughters’.84 However, unlike Erickson, this process is centred on new visions, new arrangements, of the sacred. It can be initiated by what Jantzen, drawing on Irigaray, calls ‘a new feminist imaginary’ which has as its aim, ‘disrupting the symbolic and its powers, by displacing its masculinist structures with a new imaginary, [so that] new ways of conceiving and being might emerge which enable women to be subjects as women’.85 A central process of this new symbolic is the work of women imagining themselves as part of a divine reality. Jantzen86 argues that because religion has been so fundamental to the conceptual systems of the West, it is of paramount importance to disrupt the religious symbolic. The nature of this disruption is the work of feminist imaginaries of divinity where a new idea of God provides a horizon for ‘becoming’. Although women are often religious, the religions of the West with their male gods offer no way for women to achieve subjectivity in relation to a divine horizon. Jantzen interprets Irigaray as saying: The masculinist religious symbolic must be disrupted and space made for the female divine. ‘This god, are we capable of imagining it as a woman? Can we dimly see it as the perfection of our subjectivity?’87

What is being proposed here – that women must search for and achieve a specific life-affirming subjectivity according to our potentiality (our divine-ness) – locates religion and the sacred in a different realm to Erickson’s folk religions and magicalism. For Irigaray and Jantzen, this would constitute a reversal of relations in the sacredprofane dualism, not a transformation of it. However, I do think that Erickson’s argument that magical and folk religions provide an important pathway towards 83 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 275. 84 Ibid., p. 193. 85 Ibid., p. 12. 86 Ibid., pp. 9–12. 87 Grace M. Jantzen, ‘Luce Irigaray: Introduction’, in Graham Ward (ed), The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 191–7.

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understanding how the masculinized sacred has been resisted, has been clearly visible in women’s strategic responses to, and embracing of, new age spiritualities. But her conclusion88 that true liberation – and subjectivity – will only come when gender (and other forms of social division) is dismantled, remains problematic, especially in relation to Irigaray’s assertion that sexuality is not just a social construction but an essential element of humanity. The Irigarian task is to work towards a new ethics of sexual difference that can sustain difference as productive and life affirming and re-imagine identity as constitutive of divinity. This short meditation on feminist interjections into constructions of the sacred demonstrates, if nothing else, that the sacred remains a seriously problematic realm of social inquiry, given the continuing, indeed escalating, level of global and regional violence and its justifications by various religious and political ideologies. There is no doubt that feminist discourse makes a difference by understanding the connections between religion and violence and invoking various political and creative responses. ‘Post’ theory provides a significant arena for responding to global crises and reorienting human relations to inclusiveness and justice. The decolonization of the sacred has just begun; its power and operations need further analysis with particular attention to gender.

88 Erickson, Where Silence Speaks, p. 194.

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Chapter 10

Melting Hearts of Stone Mary T. Condren

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? W.B. Yeats: ‘Easter 1916’

Introduction Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote the above lines in the wake of the devastation of the First World War, and following the deaths of former friends and acquaintances executed by the British after the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. In the last thirty-five years of civil conflict in Ireland, the verse has often been repeated. But now on the world stage the discourse of sacrifice enjoys a new uncritical hegemony as it legitimizes both the war on terror, as well as the actions of those designated as ‘terrorists’. The call of Jesus (and the prophets of most religious traditions), ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’, has been ignored. Westerners have lived in what philosopher Julia Kristeva1 calls a ‘sacrificial social order’ in which scapegoats are continually fabricated as sacrificial victims. Given this history, and its effects on women, in particular, post-modernists need to return to those religious sources silenced, crushed (or canonized − the same thing) by the dominant authorities. Post-modern theorists could do worse than to return to the prophetic injunction, ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’. Uttered by the Hebrew prophets, by Jesus and many saints who followed in his name, and echoed by the prophets of other religious traditions, this injunction has been largely ignored by the dominant religions, except in a form in which mercy served to clean up the excesses of unbridled sacrifice. Whereas sacrifice serves to legitimize male hegemony in the public world; mercy is effeminized, privatized, and serves to protect the purveyors of sacrifice (and their victims) from the worst effects.2 1 Julia Kristeva, ‘Woman’s time’, in Tori Moi (ed.), The Kristeva reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 187–213. 2 Nancy Jay, Throughout your generations forever: Sacrifice, religion, and paternity (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992); Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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Sacrifice is a feminist issue, and this essay continues the work of those feminist theologians who critique the effects of the Christian sacrificial legacy.3 It clearly distinguishes between self-sacrifice and mercy, and seeks to highlight the potential of ‘mercy’ in developing horizons for post-modernist religious interrogations. This essay will address the following questions: Why is the question of sacrifice so important? What is the difference between sacrifice and mercy? Theoretically and practically, how do we begin to put mercy rather than sacrifice at the heart of cultural and religious practice? Religion and Post-modernism Heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and by materialist philosophies, critics of religion have traditionally called for rationality to replace religious illusion. They assumed that knowledge would lead, if not to virtue, at least to choice. In the 1970s, even theologians cried out that ‘God is dead’ without knowing who or what might take His place. In recent years, however, a post-modernist return to religion has occurred, partly in response to increased awareness that traditional religions hold no monopoly on totalitarianism, reification, hegemony or violence. Furthermore, new forms of communal life (Nazism, Maoism, Remembrance Days) have emerged where militarist rather than religious icons dominate the landscape. Some post-modernists (especially those influenced by Jacques Lacan) look anew to religion, given its power to disrupt totalitarian ideologies through hysterical eruptions or to promote counter-cultural or even transgressive practices. However, given the traditional exclusion of women from those religions legitimated by sacrifice, feminist post-modernists must approach western religion with new and gendered eyes, and not be dazzled by, or conflate its contemporary manifestations (in Rome or Canterbury) with, religion itself. Post-modernists locate the enduring power of religion in deeply rooted strategies that offer mythological or ritual solutions for the management of psychic distress.4 Such strategies are often carved out to serve the interests of social, gendered or economic power. One of their concerns is to analyze the roots of social trauma that traditional religion might have sublimated, repressed or contained, and to demystify the hidden agendas that masquerade behind ostensibly spiritual language. They might argue, for instance, that stories like the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis are true, not in a scientific sense, but because they encapsulate the pain of separation from the mother’s body, the Garden of Paradise. Such stories, as

3 Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn, Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989). 4 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (trans. by Leon Roudiez) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, introd. by Otto F. Kernberg) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

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I have argued in a previous work,5 were formulated when Judaism was making a transition from a society centred around the mother, to one centred around the father, warriors and the king, in what Joseph Campbell refers to as ‘The Great Reversal’.6 In the hands of powerful religious officiaries, such mythological accounts of origins became concretized, ontologized and petrified. One discourse, in particular, that of redemption, has dominated western Christianity. Redemption narratives form the basis for elaborate theologies of atonement and sacrifice that underpin the power structures of both the high Church and fundamentalist Christianity. However, in the secular world redemption narratives also hold sway. For nearly two thousand years, Christianity dominated religious theologies and practices in the western world, but now the cross that once stood in the middle of every European village in homage to Christ who died for all – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices – has effectively been replaced by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier who gave his life for all in the war to end all wars. Where once, for instance, the authority of the Holy Roman Empire underpinned the authority structures of national and political leaders, now, according to René Girard: The bomb does seem indeed like a prince of this world, enthroned above a host of priests and worshippers, who exist, so it would seem, only to do it service. Some of them bury poisoned eggs of the idol beneath the earth; others deposit them at the bottom of the seas; yet others sprinkle the heavens with them, causing the stars of death to revolve endlessly above the teeming ant heap. No slightest section of nature − now that science has cleansed it of all the ancient projections of the supernatural − has not been reinvested with the truth of violence. But this time we cannot pretend that the power for destruction is anything but human, even though it works in ways that parallel the working of the sacred. 7

In the light of the nuclear threat to human life and the natural earth, Girard argues that mythical consciousness must now be replaced by a profound awareness of the political effects of myths. Unconsciousness, or innocence, is a luxury the human race can no longer afford. In the words of Sheila Devaney: ‘Not an ontology of truth, but a politics of truth is what is demanded today.’ 8 The post-modernist return to religion, therefore, is to be welcomed, bringing, as it will, the most sophisticated tools of analysis to bear on the intractable dilemmas of our time. However, and despite Aristotle, theorists often assume a relatively untroubled path from knowledge to virtue. Therefore, of great importance would be the concentration on those performative and disciplinary practices (rituals, 5 Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). 6 Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 36. 7 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 255. 8 Sheila Greeve Devaney, ‘Problems with Feminist Theory: Historicity and the Search for Sure Foundations’, in Paula M. Cooey, Sharon A. Farmer, Mary Ellen Ross (eds), Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 84.

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meditations, prayers) that traditionally comprise religion and, arguably, play as great a role in shaping the social order as any belief systems. The Discourse of Sacrifice While it is commonplace among some Churches to say that they reject sacrifice, antisacrificial discourse often camouflages its continuity. The Protestant Reformation challenged the degradation that had set in to the Roman Catholic Church by its control of the economy of sacrifice. Clerical corruption, the sale of indulgences, monopolies of power had been widespread. But the Protestant Reformation (with the exception of some radical sects) left unchallenged the economy or logic of sacrifice insofar as it merely appropriated the power of sacrifice to itself –often in the interests of the new European nation states. Far from repudiating sacrifice, Eurocentric postChristian societies have simply devised their own militarist versions. Sacrificial ideologies have run riot on every side in western thinking, spiritualities and practices. The poppy fields of France and Belgium, the Nazi extermination camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the threat of nuclear destruction stand in stark contrast to the great technological achievements of the twentieth century. In my own Irish context, over three thousand women, men and children have been killed, mostly by near neighbours, in wars of paramilitary violence during the past thirty-five years in Northern Ireland. Thousands more have been left permanently maimed, orphaned and widowed. Religious themes have permeated the conflict. Some would like to think that the dynamics of sacrifice would not hold sway in a post-Christian society. But one has only to examine the logic that underpins warrior discourse to see otherwise. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt . . . that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.9

The commentator John Nef remarks: It was the sacrifice, not the cause which Holmes glorified … In an earlier Memorial Day address of 1884, he had made plain that he regarded the sacrifice made by the southern soldiers as no less sacred than that made by the northern. 10

New dramas of sacrifice, atonement, and redemption are being played out before our eyes: old theological controversies take on a lethal significance. Unless ways are found to deconstruct the apparatus of sacrifice, its underlying pattern will be

9 Cited in John U. Nef, War and Human Progress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 406. 10 Ibid.

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uncritically recreated. In this nuclear age, as Albert Einstein once commented: ‘Everything has changed except our way of thinking.’ Theology once might have asked why God permits such evil. But recent work on the mechanisms and mindsets of sacrifice firmly places the responsibility for most destructive ideologies and practices back onto the human community. As Girard has observed: ‘Absolute vengeance, formerly the prerogative of the gods, now returns, precisely weighed and calibrated, on the wings of science.’11 How is it that the Christian revolution, that started out so promisingly two thousand years ago, appears (in all but name) to have ground to a halt? In this article I am confining my understanding and analysis of sacrifice to the Eurocentric culture with which I am familiar: I do not attempt to generalize beyond those confines. In addition, the focus is not on the practices of sacrifice which differ widely throughout the world, but on the discourse of sacrifice operative in the western religious and political world. I do this for several reasons. Although many writers use the word sacrifice as though there is agreement as to its meaning, definitions of sacrifice are often circular, contextual, or self-serving. Anthropologist of religion, Nancy Jay, provides a history of attempts to define sacrifice but concludes: ‘To bring “sacrifice” under our control as a perfectly defined object of analysis, to cut out and classify its constituent elements, is more like doing sacrifice than understanding it.’12 One of the difficulties with the term ‘sacrifice’ is its multivalent and slippery usage. The word can refer to the Christian God’s sacrifice of His only son to redeem the world, a sacred offering to various deities, as well as the sacrifice of oneself for family, friend or nation. In reality, the word chosen should be choose. ‘I choose to do this, rather than that’. In the public world those who use the word sacrifice rather than choose often do so in order to take the high moral ground or to establish the power structures in the post-sacrificial religious or political order. It is important, therefore, to interrogate what kinds of things sacrifice does in the public world. What Sacrifice Does Creating the Enemy Some post-modernists13 argue that (at least in western society) we come to consciousness only in relation to what is perceived as ‘Other’ in the process of distinguishing between ourselves and those around us. Othering might be endemic to human consciousness, and sacrifice may be its culturally elaborated form. 11 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (trans. by Patrick Gregory) (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 140. Orig. La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1972). 12 Jay, Throughout your generations forever, pp. xxv–xxvi. 13 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana Collins, 1959: 1974); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Nancy Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’, Feminist Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (1981): 38–56.

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However, what is most threatening to the established order is difference that exposes the precariousness of identity. Vatican statements are always valuable for the unapologetic evidence they offer of the mentality of the sacrificial social order. A statement on homosexuality declared as follows: Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.14

Following on from the language of the first statement, the second is a non sequitur. Nevertheless, the difference represented by homosexuals, like gypsies, political refugees, Blacks, foreigners and strangers cannot be tolerated in a sacrificial social order charged with separating the unconscious and conscious, rational and irrational, abject and pure. Homosexual identities are fluid, or liminal, so they threaten the rigid boundaries of communities where sacrificially achieved distinctions are maintained. Sacrifice and Abjection We also repudiate parts of ourselves that we consider to be ‘abject’. In western societies, especially those that repudiate matri-centred social systems or symbols, abjection often centres on reminders of the maternal body – blood, urine, faeces, milk. Keeping the abject at bay is a life-long process: the toiletry industry thrives on its eradication. According to Elizabeth Grosz, the ‘abject’ is the symbol of what is rejected, concealed or contained in order to maintain order: The abject is what beckons the subject ever closer to its edge. It insists on the subject’s necessary relation to death, corporeality, animality, materiality – those relations which consciousness and reason find intolerable. The abject attests to the impossibility of clear borders, lines of demarcation or divisions between the proper and the improper, the clean and the unclean, order and disorder as required by the symbolic. Symbolic relations separate the subject from the abyss that haunts and terrifies it.15

Repudiating the abject becomes synonymous with independence. But abjection is all around us and we project our fears of losing independence onto Others. We also persecute those Others, lest whatever they represent re-infect our own psyche or the assumed purity of our social order. Once we have excluded and rejected parts of ourselves we recognize such parts in Others and persecute them, lest their abjection re-infect our own psyche or the purity of our social or psychic order. In Jungian terms the ‘Other’ is our Shadow, 14 Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Persona Humana Declaration on certain questions concerning sexual ethics, 29 December 1975, p. 4. 15 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Wellington, London, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989), p. 73.

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the negative side of ourselves that haunts us as we go about our daily business. Meeting strangers, or foreigners, especially outside the context of clean, plush, and disinfected hotels, raises up our old fears: Will they re-infect us? Whatever is defined as ‘Other’ is a cultural construct that serves the interests of power. Distinctions of caste, class and race reinforce cultural ideals based upon maintaining separations. In the western world, the White, wealthy heterosexual male represents the cultural ideal. Although few can aspire to all the terms of this ideal, those on the lower end of the hierarchy derive enough benefits to maintain and defend its reified categories. On this scale, poor White ignorant men are considered superior to rich, Black, cultured women. One of the effects of repudiating abjection is that it promotes oppositional logic: the logic of I/ and Not/I. When I was growing up in Ireland, we did not have Catholics and Protestants, we had Catholics and Non-Catholics. In America there are Whites and Non-Whites. In western history the Not/I has historically been women, the poor and other races. It is a simple matter to turn the Other into an enemy. We seldom accomplish the work of repudiating abjection or othering in isolation: group solidarity is crucial. In addition, the social order needs regular rejuvenation through rituals, parades, symbols and myths that provide social affirmation, groupthinking, and theatres of communal action that continually separate the clean from the unclean, culture from nature. This is where the public religious rites come into play. Ritual activities often include a non-verbal, often unconscious, grammar of social stratification. The elevated positions of the celebrants, the question of who may or may not wear uniforms, robes or costumes, the provision of special seating for the rich, and the separation of male and female are as much a part of the language of ritual as any underlying stories or mythologies (Jay, 1992). Such unconscious strategies reinforce the structures of power, separating the I/ from the Not/I. Likewise, public rituals offer communal affirmation that legitimize the horrors and atrocities of war while concealing the hidden agendas of power. As David Tracy has argued: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’16 Sacrifice and Festival In western society, war rather than religion now functions as a political rite of legitimation and as the main theatre for abjecting the ‘Other’. A time of war in many communities is often equivalent to a type of festival in which the normal rules governing human behaviour are temporarily lifted, making possible unthinkable acts.17 The world is turned upside down. The beggar becomes king. Differences of class, status or position can be collapsed and a new status temporarily achieved.

16 David Tracy, Plurality and ambiguity: hermeneutics, religion, hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 85. 17 Mary Condren, ‘Sacrifice and political legitimation: The construction of a gendered social order’, The Journal of Women’s History, 6:4; 7:1 (Spring, 1995): 160–89.

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Legitimacy is conferred upon deeds otherwise considered to be atrocities: rape and murder become not only possible, but sanctified. Sacrificial themes, accompanied by biblical quotations that enable participants to jump to the high moral ground, sanitize and sacralize the horror of such occasions. The festival of war generates psychic numbing in which the boundaries of the self are dissolved and a new heroic identity – preferably one that temporarily relieves the painfulness or ignominy or one’s actual status, is forged. ‘You say it is the good cause that hallows every war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause.’18 The festival mindset enables participants to displace responsibility for their actions onto a Higher Power in the name of obedience, and to abdicate their own responsibility. As the poet, Siegfried Sassoon, wrote of the First World War: And in those seven years I have erected A barrier, that my soul might be protected Against the invading ghosts of what I saw In years when Murder wore the masks of Law. (Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A Footnote on the War’)

Toward the end of the festival a dramatic act of sacrifice, the recrucifying of Christ in the Catholic Mass (or Hiroshima, Nagasaki) often takes place. Such an act ritually re-iterates the thetic moment (the condition of consciousness itself) whether this is envisaged as the break away from or killing of the father − Sigmund Freud − or the mother −Melanie Klein.19 Once such a dramatic act takes place, the renewed social order can be re-instated. Kings become kings once again: beggars remain beggars. The after effects of sacrificially designated acts separate what is culturally designated as impure from pure, unconsciousness from consciousness, chaos from civilization. They act to ensure that those we have defined as Other are excluded from the post-sacrificial social or religious order. Sacrifice through war plays a vital role in the establishment and maintenance of hierarchy,20 especially now that traditional religion no longer fulfils that purpose. In the post-war period the sacrificial beneficiaries are put in place. In political sacrifice, if one has not fought in the First or Second World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, or in whatever political event established the particular political order, one is an unworthy citizen. War veterans often claim that they can best represent the Common Good for they had sacrificed themselves for the survival of the community. This is why the question of sacrifice, the repudiation of abjection, the process of ‘Othering’ is so important for us today: War has become a new kind of theodicy establishment ritual, now that traditional religion or God no longer fulfils that purpose. War is the ultimate rite of political legitimation in our time.

18 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra: A book for everyone and no one (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 74. 19 Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Seuil, 1980), trans. by Leon Roudiez,. Powers of horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 20 Jay, Throughout your generations forever.

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However, if, as post-modernists argue, the propensity to sacrifice or othering appears to be endemic to human consciousness, perhaps the challenge for us today is that like other psychic realities (murder, envy, incest) it can now be analyzed and made amenable to culture and ethics. Spiritual and religious practitioners, (whatever stories or traditions they might work from) share the common duty and responsibility to deconstruct the logic of sacrifice, psychically and politically. Self-sacrifice Challenging the economy of sacrifice, or any of its ritual paraphernalia, is, in any society, considered the ultimate blasphemous act. Not only is the challenge directed toward the structures of power and their legitimation strategies, but also, it seems, toward those figures − dead soldiers in particular − who died for us. How could such ingratitude be possible or, indeed, tolerated? Isn’t there a difference between acts of sacrifice and self-sacrifice? After all, was it not said that greater love no man hath than to lay down his life for his friend? Biblical epithets such as these are used liberally in war situations. However, they fail to ask if those who are laying down their lives do so in the process of taking the lives of others. Many wars are waged explicitly under the auspices of self-sacrifice. Indeed, as J. Glenn Gray argued: This capacity for self-sacrifice is what all defenders of war use as their final argument for the necessity and ultimate morality of war. Since men can only be brought by such extreme means to a recognition of their true nature and their essential relationships, these defenders tell us, it is folly to abolish war, because it would be to abolish death itself.21

In the Irish conflict, Bobby Sands used such language to justify his hunger strike to achieve particular political objectives. Even the visiting chaplains were struck dumb in the face of such discourse.22 However, in the immediate aftermath of his death, over sixty people were killed in the riots that followed: these deaths are never mentioned in the post-sacrificial scenarios surrounding his legacy. Failing to challenge such sacrificial logic, therefore, is to leave intact those potent, unconscious factors that underlie sacrificial dynamics and make wars ever more lethal. It is also to leave unchallenged the proposition that there is a necessary continuity between one’s ethically based motivation for particular acts and their political effects. As Nietzsche has argued: Martyrs have harmed truth ... And even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honourable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.

21 J. Glenn Gray, The warriors (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 48. 22 Mary Condren, ‘War, Religion, Gender and Psyche: An Irish Perspective’, in Christina von Braun, Ulrike Brunotte, Gabriele Dietze, Daniela Hrzan, Gabriele Jähnert, Dagmar Pruin (eds), Holy War and Gender: ‘Gotteskrieg’ und ‘Geschlecht’, Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin (New Brunswick, NJ, London: Transaction Publishers, 2006), pp. 143–77.

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What? Does the fact that someone gives up his life for it change anything in the value of a cause? … Woman is today on her knees before an error because she has been told that someone died on the Cross for it. Is the Cross then an argument? ... But blood is the worst witness of truth: blood poisons and transforms the purest teaching to delusion and hatred of the heart. … And if someone goes through fire for his teaching − what does that prove? Truly, it is more when one’s own teaching comes out of one’s own burning!23

Politics of Self-sacrifice At the risk of engaging in sacrificial logic, or the logic of opposition, the first thing to be said about what mercy is must be to elaborate on what it is not. Although it may evoke feelings of pity, compassion, charity or love, the practice of mercy cannot be encapsulated by any of these. In particular, mercy is not self-sacrifice. While sacrifice in the public realm can establish tremendous debts of guilt that must be paid off by religious or political devotees, self-sacrifice in the private realm, because it lacks a structure of representation, is perhaps even more powerful. Beneath the uses of the words, self-sacrifice, however well intentioned, may also be the urge to gain control, to solicit or establish the indebtedness of the gods, family, Church or nation. For those with little access to social power, self-sacrifice confers authority on their actions and establishes a process of indebtedness at the same time. Using myths of salvation, disturbed individuals, or whole societies undergoing identity crises, can surmount their feelings of powerlessness by adopting new mythological identities while blocking the painful process of actual development. Much like the practice of sacrifice, self-sacrifice can be a spurious means of constructing an ego or identity where the original one has never been formed or is badly damaged. For instance, if someone does something for the love of God, the revolution or the starving masses in Africa, the discourse of self-sacrifice provides the necessary legitimation and the subsequent actions will not be a threat to the dominant order. However, the valorization the self-sacrifier receives serves to reinforce her or his circumscribed roles while doing nothing to change the social conditions of those at the receiving end of such charity. Self-sacrifice in Political Action Self-sacrifice can be profoundly political especially in its ability (like sacrifice) to compel indebtedness. Whereas public sacrifice often leads to forms of political hegemony, self-sacrifice can lead to masochism, horizontal violence and selfsacrificial ideologies that function to keep oppressed groups in subservience.24 The culture of self-sacrifice carries with it the myth of powerlessness, often preventing 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 171. 24 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Orig. Sexes et Parentés (Paris, 1987).

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oppressed groups from studying the kinds of power they do have, reducing them to a condition of moral imbecility in the use of that power. Especially in those groups where oppressed people are actively striving to change their conditions, self-sacrifice leads to what is often described as implosions of power. The operative myth here is that since everyone ‘has made sacrifices’ for the revolution, political action, or whatever, the group formed has implicitly (and magically) collapsed all personal differences overnight. Groups apparently band together in equality for the sake of a common goal, but then furiously try to erase all differences appearing among them, especially that represented by a leader who gains power apparently ‘at our expense’. Such dynamics lead to the leadership thrashing that alternative political groups regularly experience. They turn such leaders into scapegoats who, excluded from the community, magically take away their own envy and jealousy, re-establishing the group’s purity.25 As Luce Irigaray argues of women’s self-sacrifice: Forbidden to celebrate ritual or to participate in social institutions, women are reduced to the polemics and rules of the private sphere. Women are habitually confined to the home and to relations with other women, with children, with mothers and daughters … Revenge is taken, outside of law or rights, in the form of private attacks, whether concerted or not.26

Motherhood and Self-sacrifice Women usually do not go to war or sacrifice in any of the major religious traditions but their capacity for self-sacrifice has potent political effects. Women develop overcompensatory forms of motherhood (the suffocating maternal bond) in lieu of their general powerlessness, but then effectively recreate those situations that keep them powerless. The fact that a woman has sacrificed gives her the right to make powerful demands upon her children since there is an element of blackmail involved. Often these demands are not even articulated, leaving the children in a considerable state of confusion and anxiety. The end result of using guilt in order to achieve one’s ends are, however, usually alienation, disappointment and bitterness for the martyr, and considerable justification and unexpressed hostility for those whom she wished to control – the famous Jewish or Irish mothers are good examples. Women who try furiously to adapt to their roles in the sacrificial social order, sacrifice themselves. Those who are the mercy of such a mother’s ambivalent ‘selfsacrifice’ often resort to violent and contradictory ways in order to shake it off. In the face of their mother’s seeming powerlessness, sons desperately define themselves as Not-Women, and search furiously for a compensatory, revengeful and exaggerated

25 Mary Condren, ‘Forgetting our divine origins: The warning of Dervogilla’, in Joan Marler (ed.), From the realm of the Ancestors: An anthology in honor of Marija Gimbutas (Manchester, CT: Knowledge and Ideas Inc, 1997), pp. 416–31. 26 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, p. 85.

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male identity that often finds violent expression resulting in the vicious cycle of ‘the mother, the macho and the state’.27 Women who buy into the myth of their own powerlessness, who have no sense of self-worth, become incapable of conferring an enabling form of recognition upon their children, allowing them successfully to individuate. Often, according to Sara Ruddick, the ‘good mother’ trains her ‘daughters for powerlessness and sons for war’.28 Their female children will usually react to this by emulating their mother’s behaviour and lack of self esteem, making them particularly prone to becoming codependants of substance abusers, and vulnerable to the physical and psychological abusiveness of the sadomasochistic syndrome. Self-sacrifice and Power Self-sacrifice is not the power to make decisions; it is the power to be anarchistic, to react against decisions and make us even more dependent on those who hold the real political power in our society. It is covert rather than overt; dependent rather than independent. Understood as charity, self-sacrifice can be an uncritical means for some to retain status, power and privilege in an exploitative economy that discriminates against the poor, oppressed and those against whom the dominant social order has been established. It establishes what Erik Erickson (1963) has termed the ‘devious dominance’ of oppressed subjects, or the ‘tyranny of the weak’. The kind of power thus exercised is essentially victim power. A character in a Graham Greene story once observed a nun crying in a train. Asked why she was crying, the nun replied that she had spent her life in a leprosy colony and now ‘they have found a cure for leprosy’. The dominant social order welcomes self-sacrificial initiatives since it cleans up the excesses of the individualist striving that underlie the exacerbated quest for autonomy. As Elise Boulding (1988) argues, the energies common to human beings have been redirected so that men seek power and women protect men from the consequences of power seeking. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice are, therefore, two sides of the same coin. The alternative is not simply self-indulgence but mercy, a practice carved out from the excruciating path toward self-awareness. What Is Mercy? Although sacrifice has been the subject of countless tomes, debates and even wars, the theological question of mercy has rarely been explicitly addressed. It could be argued that the radical potential of mercy has never been developed simply because it has not been in the interests of the powerful to do so. Sacrifice has served European culture very well, legitimizing its political structures and its colonial efforts across the world. 27 Joan Myers, ‘The Mother, the Macho, and the State’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 1:1 (1984): 73–82. 28 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (London: Women’s Press, 1989).

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Yet, just as the word ‘sacrifice’ has, in the history of religions, been used to serve the interests of those in power, so too the word ‘mercy’ has often uncritically shored up exploitative and inequitable regimes. In the Christian tradition, Mary, the Mother of God, is regularly appealed to in prayer as mother of mercy. The role of Mary, however, is often devious. In legends she undermines the harsh decisions of a judging God. Likewise, goddesses within patriarchal traditions often sabotage the brutal effects of a sacrificial theology. This may be a subtle way of re-enforcing a punitive system by providing a refuge from its harsher doctrines without challenging its basic nature. In the Christian tradition we often hear the words ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ The word ‘Lord’ implies dominance. Those who define themselves as sinners are often those culturally abject. The mercy appealed to can be an unwitting way of shoring up oppressive regimes and maintaining intact the power structure of those regimes. However, in the work of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus, sacrifice is not just a problem to which mercy is the solution, as in the injunction ‘Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.’ Whenever the prophets use the words ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ they directly challenge the religious and political powers of their time. The prophets call for mercy when the priestly classes wish to use sacrifice to control the acts of God, to enforce submission to petty religious proscriptions or to exclude the abject (tax collectors or sinners) from the company of Jesus. (Hosea 6:1–6; 1 Samuel 15:22–23; Matthew 9:13, 12:1–8.) An example of mercy is Jesus’ response to those who condemned a woman caught in adultery. Condemned by the religious officiaries of her time, they tried to implicate Jesus in her stoning. Jesus responded: ‘If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ (John 8:7). This story captures the essence of the practice of mercy: recognizing the potential for evil or the shadow in ourselves, or in the logic of our group, at the moment we hold the stones in our hands. If maintaining the sacrificial social order takes serious work, the practice of mercy is no less demanding. Adopting the stance of mercy is to commit oneself to a life’s work of personal and cultural critique. Akin to cultural shadow work, the practice of mercy aims to understand the process of projection and abjection; deconstruct our impetus to make Others; evolve imaginative ways of non-sacrificial knowing; and work toward structural relations of justice. The Practice of Mercy Whereas sacrifice and self-sacrifice shore up unjust regimes, the litmus test for mercy is whether our practices aim toward eradicating structures of privilege and injustice, rather than maintaining such structures to provide subtle and devious means of maintaining our own superiority. Traditionally, priests practice sacrifice, while prophets call for mercy. Prophets are all those cultural critics – artists, poets, writers, political activists – who call a community to integrity, having little authorization but the witness of their lives

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and faithfulness to their calling. Prophets stand outside the sacrificial social order (whether by choice or destiny) alongside the excluded, the rejected, the outcasts, perpetually asking the awkward questions. Prophets are not fortune-tellers: prophets are those who do not so much ‘foresee’ the future as work actively to imagine and ensure a better future for all. It is the fate of prophets to have more questions than answers. The practice of mercy, therefore, might be encapsulated as the practice and art of asking the awkward questions. The first of these concerns power. What Is the Currency of Power? The work of mercy is that of reading and excavating the currency of power that can often be best illustrated in the cultural codes of abjection. The prophet de-codes the codes of abjection to see what is excluded, what is valued, who is being pushed out, where is it happening? Since these codes sometimes change, within and between cultures, the prophet cries out ‘mercy, not sacrifice’ when whole communities seek to condemn their ‘Others’ into subjugation. The prophet might ask: Why do features of skin (colour) matter, rather than other defining bodily characteristics? Why does erasing psychic abjection (psychiatrists, priests) cost so much more than erasing bodily abjection (nurses, cleaners)? What are we to make, for instance, of the fact that whereas the blood of women defiles, the blood of men saves? Why are women raped in war whereas men are killed rather than castrated? What unconscious language is operative here? Who Are the Scapegoats? An old Celtic text says that sacrifice is responsible for rescuing the earth from the demons (Rees and Rees, 1978, p. 79). Creating demons appears to be one of the central tasks of religious functionaries. Indeed, without demons (scapegoats on whom we can project all our own unresolved psychic issues), sacrificially based religions could hardly exist. The scapegoat serves to reinforce the boundaries of the dominant group. Fallen women, Magdalenes, serve to remind women of the awful fate that awaits them should they challenge or ignore the requirements of patriarchal marriage. Once such demons or ‘Others’ have been created, religious sacrifice has traditionally acted to ensure that they are excluded from social or religious order. If sacrifice rescues the earth from the demons, mercy might now rescue the demons from those who define them as such. A merciful practice challenges the scapegoating system by actively seeking out the excluded, rejected and marginalized – all those at whose expense a dominant identity has been achieved. Traditional scapegoats, practices and texts contain vital clues about the mentality of the sacrificial social order. The practice of mercy seeks them out for their own sakes, but also for the information they hold about the sacrificial mentality. We should, as Michel Foucault (1972) argues, look to the subjugated knowledges and practices, especially those made problematic by the sacrificial social order. These include

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traditional ethnic wisdom and language, expurgated texts, the medical wisdom of the wise women, the texts eliminated from the canons of sacred scripture. In ancient Irish society, the poets were those who lived liminally. They delivered their pronouncement at the boundaries between this world and the Otherworld, potent sources of creativity. Prophets – like artists, poets, theologians, mythologists and dancers – must do the personal, cultural and political work necessary to keep those boundaries fluid, playful and open in the interests, not so much of the Otherworld, but the World of the Other. In this sense, the scandal of the cross would be located, not in defending an outmoded world-view, or engaging in masochistic or transgressive practices, but in taking on one’s shoulders the task of generating cultural forms of mercy toward those culturally constructed as abject. Mercy Allows the Flow of Grace Those who offer sacrifice ask that it be pleasing to God, but in reality, little room is left in the economy of sacrifice for the workings of the unearned gift of God’s grace. Grace is mediated through the sacrificial officiaries or their work. Since those charged with interpreting Sacred Scripture – Tradition, or Charter texts – are those carrying full honours in the sacrificial economy, change or renewal becomes difficult, if not impossible. The assumption is made that God, grace or mercy could not possibly exist or be an ongoing reality for anyone other than those charged with being channels of that grace; that is, the ordained. Just as sacrifice constantly requires an Other, the grace deriving from sacrifice depends on a constant flow of sin. The sin industry has been responsible for much of the degradation that has crept into Christianity. The Protestant Reformations challenged this degradation. Clerical corruption, the sale of indulgences, monopolies of power (control of the economy of sacrifice and implicitly grace, has been widespread. But these Reformations (with the exception of some radical sects) left unchallenged the economy or logic of sacrifice insofar as it merely appropriated the power of sacrifice to itself – often in the interests of the new European nation states. If sacrifice seeks to control the work of grace, mercy leaves us powerless to act except by the grace of God. A theology of mercy stands with the prophet Job at the height of his affliction. Against all his detractors, he bowed to ineffability. Such evil, as he experienced, could never be caused or willed by God. Job knew that eliminating fate, chance or tragedy in the human condition has inevitably led to greater human evil. The great Greek tragedians also knew this. But, as Simone Weil points out, it is something that those who, in their urge to control, conveniently and quickly forgot.29 ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’ summarizes in one breath the difference between a theology based on sacrifice, control and power, and a theology based on mercy, compassion and grace. 29 Simone Weil, ‘The Illiad: A Poem of Might’, in George A. Panichas (ed.), The Simone Weil Reader: A Legendary Spiritual Odyssey for Our Time (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1981), pp. 181–2.

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Where Are Our Origins? Global technology has infiltrated the whole world. Ironically, however, this has not led to global peace but often to even more desperate searches for identity, purity of origins and heroic mythologies. Far from coming to terms with our own human limitations, our minuteness in the scheme of things, and to a reverence for our Mother the Earth on whom all our foundations rest, political strategies increasingly seem designed to sacrifice the earth for the sake of one or other synthetically constructed heroic identity. The sacrificial mentality has never seemed more dangerous. A vital component of the public rites of sacrifice that serves to renew the social order has been the myth of return to the Golden Age, a time of pristine purity unpolluted by contaminated political or mythical lineages. Returning to origins is often necessary to challenge the hegemony of the present political order, to renew culture and to remember the ideals held out in one’s charter documents. But how do we go about such return? What counts as origins? Our experience in Europe (not least in Ireland) would suggest that the return to origins, ancient traditions, can be deeply ambivalent and profoundly retrogressive. Political groups appeal to their founding charters, the Battle of the Boyne, Easter 1916, the First World War, ethnic lineages, not for inspiration and renewal but to hold onto petrified and often unjust political divisions. Our biblical ancestors were told to take the women and children captive and put all the men to the sword, thus erasing the patrilineal inheritance of the defeated. The ancient Greeks thought that by re-establishing or tracing a pure lineage (unpolluted by foreigners) they could achieve social perfection. Such ‘return to origins’ is chillingly replicated in war today where war often serves to erase the lineage of one’s opponent. Rape camps in the Balkans were specifically designed to erase ethnicity or permanently pollute the bloodlines of the defeated. Aid workers in Bosnia observed male and female corpses coming into hospitals with their abdomens closed with pins. The abdomens of pregnant women had been filled with sand: their fetuses were placed inside the bodies of defeated male soldiers. In addition, such myths of origins play on deeply powerful human dreams of the possibility of unmediated intimacy with the pre-Oedipal mother. As Scott Peck wrote: A crucial factor in evil ... is not simply a regressive yearning for Mother (which can be used for healing) but rather the attempt to obtain Mother without regression – an insistence on receiving mothering without relinquishing either the adult role or any of the power associated with it.30

Returning to origins must, therefore, be mediated by an understanding of its underlying logic, a logic that can be playful and imaginative, or reified and cruel. Simply using Mother language does not guarantee immunity from evil: indeed, it can often be the source. In Nazi Germany and in other wars, the appeal to the

30 M. Scott Peck, People of the lie (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 160.

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Motherland was simply a devious strategy that exploited deep psychic longings. All who did not conform to the cultural ideal of purity were exterminated. Such rituals, or such concern for the Motherland within the mystifying rhetoric of war, conceals its phallic underpinning.31 Drawing on maternal energy, it functions similarly to the Virgin Mary, offering a putative idealization of women, while simultaneously keeping real women in their place. For instance, a common ritual of kingship in early Ireland was that of the king bathing in the blood of a mare. Other rituals involve the king entering the menstruation hut, usually the scene of abjection. The king, according to one theorist, absorbed ‘the female entropy’, which the priest ‘transforms into energy’.32 Strategies also serve race division. As Toni Morrison observes: ‘A layer of blackness applied to a white face released it from law.’33 Whites take on the trappings of minstrelsy or use Black sources of wisdom, mythology, song or poetry, not to open up the cultural possibilities for Blacks but to establish their own street credibility or even to gain temporary release from the rigours of culture. Judges may sleep with prostitutes, regenerating themselves in preparation for the rigours of the law; prostitutes seeking consensual sex from judges would be prosecuted. The rich appear on the doorsteps of the poor with gifts, but the poor enter the houses of the rich only by invitation (or payment). In this light we can understand how the return to origins or abjection can have very different effects on the powerless and the powerful. Today, such strategies often serve to re-inforce the structures of gender, class and race. Such festival or transgressive strategies often serve to ostensibly offer pseudo means of crossing liminal boundaries, but their consequences are asymmetrical for the powerful and the powerless. Kings gain power by becoming beggars: beggars just look ridiculous acting like kings. While the powerful can only gain power by returning to abjection, the powerless become even more powerless. The question of choice is crucial. Female rituals dealing with menstrual blood are greeted with amusement or horror; Blacks celebrating aspects of Black culture are treated with condescension. In western culture, women, Blacks, homosexuals could be said to be permanently in a state of culturally enforced abjection. It is necessary to learn the difference between condescension and liberation; charity and justice and simply immersing in abjection as a strategy of power. An astute prophetic community comprizing artists, poets, musicians, writers and dancers will recognize the need for such communal regression and find ways to enable wholesome reconciliations between ourselves and the earth, between genders, classes and races. Likewise, for cultural regeneration, we must develop and reclaim rituals, stories, practices that enable regeneration to happen in ways that preclude sacrificial resolution and foster imagination, empathy and hope. 31 Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism and the problem of domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 141. 32 Masao Yamaguchi, ‘Towards a Poetics of the Scapegoat’, in Paul Dumouchel (ed.), Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 187. 33 Toni Morrison, Playing in the dark: whiteness and literary imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 66.

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What Counts as Knowledge? When Jesus and the prophets cried out for mercy not sacrifice they were crying out against petrified social and religious realities. They were protesting the sacrificial mentality and calling for a change of heart. Traditional theology confines itself to a petrified notion of truth: that revelation apparently ceased shortly after the death of Jesus and any further revelations must be mediated through the ministrations and authority of the priestly caste whose authority is sacrificially legitimated. The practice of mercy will involve developing new forms of knowing, inclusive of the multi-dimensionality of human experience. In the Hebrew Bible the word ‘knowing’ meant to love (Adam knew his wife); to struggle (Jacob wrestled with the angel); to honour (the people knew their God). In the West, knowing has been reduced to knowing about. Physically we hear the cries of the poor; physically we see the images of malnourishment; physically we might even smell the poverty around us. Philosophia (the love of wisdom) is open to continuing revelation. Revelation can come from many sources: reflections on historical experiences, on the fragility and goodness of nature including our own, and a reflection on the experience of being victims of the sacrificial social order. Philosophia is fluid rather than rigid; tentative rather than petrified; open to new challenges rather than defending the orthodoxy. Philosophia works not only toward right theory but, more importantly, toward praxis, the union of action and theory devoted to creating a more just social order. If sacrificial thinking cuts out ambiguity, thrives on dualisms and rigid thinking, closes off imagination and fosters an either/or logic, merciful thinking does the opposite. Merciful practice inspires questions, seeks out the sacrificial victims, fosters imagination and welcomes ambivalence – especially deriving from the rejected parts of ourselves. While sacrifice establishes one’s identity at the expense of the Other, mercy embraces the Other. Through mercy, we are confronted with the radical Otherness within ourselves. Loving all those bodily and psychic parts that sacrificial ideologies consider unclean or abject, merciful practices enable us to confront our own strangeness. In this way we are able to open ourselves up to what Eva Gore-Booth called ‘imaginative pity’. As she wrote: ‘A soldier, with a universal imagination would not be able to kill another.’34 If sacrifice is the prerogative of the priests and political leaders, mercy is the prerogative of those who stand alongside the outcasts, perpetually asking questions that challenge the status quo. The wise among us must refuse the corruption of easy solutions.

34 Eva Gore-Booth, A psychological and poetic approach to the study of christ in the fourth gospel (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1923), p. 319.

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Maternal Thinking One way to develop imaginative pity might be to engage in what social theorist Sara Ruddick calls ‘maternal thinking’.35 Maternal thinking is possibly most akin to the logic of mercy. Some biblical commentators translate mercy as ‘womb-love’. Here is the challenge of mercy: not to be the flip side of a sacrificial theology, but to form the basis of a radical challenging new notion, derived from our experiences of unconditional love, ‘womb-love’, theorized to take account of the multiple dimensions of human experience. How do we draw on these dimensions to develop integrative ways of knowing, integrative ways of theologizing that no longer need to take place at the expense of the other? Political theorists traditionally separate the ethics of the common good (the sphere of politics) from those of the family. In the public world, individuals, communities, tribes and even whole nations are commonly sacrificed whenever the occasion demands, justified by the most expedient moral high ground. In the world of the family, mercy, and not sacrifice, is usually the dominant ethos. Ruddick’s work attempts to reconcile the ethics of the private and public worlds. Maternal thinking might ensure that the complexity brought to the discipline of childrearing (compassion, the embracing of complexity, the caring for the weak, equal access to family resources for all) can be theorized and brought to bear in the public world. Ruddick insists that maternal thinking is a discipline to be nurtured, akin to nonviolence training. Maternal thinking is not the prerogative of women: in the world of the family men also operate under its norms. Nevertheless, macho posturing too often substitutes for parental authority; point scoring for family mediation; winning the argument for holding family peace; the selfish cornering of economic resources for the careful sharing of family life. Ruddick, together with other feminist theorists of the last twenty years of the twentieth century, point out that the logic that has governed the most powerful political and religious worlds in the West has been dominated by masculinist thinking. Some argue that male morphology has fundamentally shaped our political and religious thinking. By this they mean that the male experience of sexuality (tension, discharge and homeostasis) shapes both political action and the culture of representation. Such a political order serves neither men nor women, although men, fortified by cultural mythology, often are convinced that they enjoy a spurious power within it. At the end of two thousand years we must commit ourselves to exploring the implications of this morphology and ask whether mercy, maternal thinking or womblove might not offer a way forward together, for women and for men. Conclusions As we seek to lead lives with integrity, the following questions must be foremost in our minds. Do we reduce the banquet table (which in the early Christian Church 35 Ruddick, Maternal Thinking.

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represented the essential equality of all) to an altar of sacrifice, or do we develop the image of the banquet where the resources of this earth are available to all regardless of race, gender or class status? For those who are Christian, do we say Jesus took away the sins of the world, and interpret the death of Jesus as a sacrifice? Or that Jesus was murdered, not just because he was loving and compassionate, but precisely because he, as well as many other religious founders, actively opposed the sacrificial thinking of the religious and political powers of his time? 36 And herein lies the challenge. At a time of increased globalization, can the altars of sacrifice be replaced by the banquet tables of mercy; a spirituality of death by a spirituality of life; hearts of stone by hearts of flesh?

36 Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ: The Emotional Plague of Mankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952).

Chapter 11

A Third Way: Explicating the Post in Post-Christian Feminism1 Frances Gray and Kathleen McPhillips

Much feminist debate in religion concerns the place of text in religious discourses, the weight and authority that should be given to those texts and the relationship between text and lived experience.2 The question of whose lived experience is represented in the debates and in the texts has recently become the focus of womanist/ feminist theorizing in Australian religious feminist circles. Both Anne Pattel-Gray and Elaine Wainwright have insisted that a valorizing politics of difference must inform feminist theory in the theological/religious domain, specifically in relation to hegemonic religious texts. They have argued that biblical readings can be exclusivist by either hiding multiple subjectivities or silencing the very possibility of giving voice to the oppressed. This paper considers this problematic – associated with textual interpretation and lived experience, beginning with the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Schüssler Fiorenza3 has identified two responses to the Bible as sacred text: either to abandon it entirely as hopelessly androcentric and irrelevant to the lived experience of women today4 or to retrieve it in an apologetic gesture which seeks to acknowledge and preserve it as a container of eternal verities which, although socially and historically situated, are still relevant for women today.5 In ‘Struggle is a Name for Hope’, an essay published in the Australian theological journal Pacifica in 1997,6 she offered an alternative to what she saw as either the exodist or apologist positions – a third way of reading Biblical texts which mediates these views. The Third Way, considered as an Hegelian tracing, is a movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis and marks a significant moment in feminist thinking in religion. The contention that the Bible is a liberatory text for women is certainly not 1 This article first appeared in 2001 in Seachanges: Journal of the Women Scholars in Religion and Theology Society, Vol. 1 January [electronic journal: www.wsrt.com.au/ seachanges] and is re-printed here with kind permission of the editors. 2 Maurice Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). 3 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Struggle is a Name for Hope: A Critical Feminist Interpretation for Liberation’, Pacifica 10(2) (1997): 224–48. 4 Daphne Hampson, After Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1996). 5 Dorothy Lee, ‘Abiding in the Fourth Gospel: A Case Study in Feminist Biblical Theology’, Pacifica 10(2) (1997): 123–6. 6 Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Struggle is a Name for Hope’.

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new. What is new is that the text is seen as text in process, much as are the lives of women historically and in terms of their current lived, embodied, experience. On Schüssler Fiorenza’s reading, the Bible is not simply an historical document. Rather it is both a proto-typical text and a living, processive text which has been formed through the experiences of women and men and which continues to function in this way. The Bible is but one text that has been constitutive, either explicitly or implicitly, of the lived experience of women who have been inscribed by Eurocentric and Christian values. If we take the Foucauldian story of the inscription of docile bodies at all seriously, and we think we should, then the role of text in the construction of subjectivity and agency is central to an elucidation of women’s or anyone’s lived experience. Bodies are inscribed by text, by discursive and non-discursive practices (spatio-temporal features like architecture and civic organization). Bodies must also be inscribed by geographical and historical locatedness. Inscribed human bodies are conscious, experiencing bodies, the site of subjectivity which emerges as an effect of discursive and non-discursive factors. On this story, there is no pre-social self. If it is the case that there is no pre-social self, that subjectivity is constituted through text, textuality and context; if it is the case that experience and subjectivity are effects of discursive practice, then lived experience emerges from text. The boundaries between subjectivity, lived experience and discursive and non-discursive practice are theoretically interesting, but ontologically blurry. In her paper, ‘Seeking and Sucking’, Catherine Keller7 remarks that ‘(f)eminist theology … does not benefit from boxing itself into the false binary opposition of either psychoanalytic individuals or liberation collectives’. The point is well taken here in the case of potentially rendering oppositional, text, subjectivity and experience. Put bluntly, what we are asserting is that text writes us and we write text. Text, discursive practice, narrative, produce subjectivity and lived experience and power relations. To delineate, indeed to oppose text and experience, is to court a form of dualistic structuring that is equally as inappropriate to feminist theorizing as any other invocation of dualistic categories or forms.8 But discursive practice is neither isolated nor individualistic. Discursive practice, text, is situated always already within and is constitutive of social practice. Text

7 Catherine Keller, ‘Seeking and Sucking: On Relation and Essence in Feminist Theology’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 54–78. 8 A good example of this is the potentially oppositional discourse engaged in by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her response to Erin White’s paper ‘Figuring and Re-figuring the Female Self: Towards a Feminist Hermeneutic’ (in Joy Morny and Penny Magee (eds), Reclaiming Our Rites (Wollstonecraft: The Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1994), pp. 135–55). White is at pains to talk about Ricoeur’s notion of narrative and the narrative or discursive construction of identity. Yet, White argues that we cannot say ‘exactly how her refiguring and configuring are related to her own life because as readers of her work we do not have access to the author herself, but only to the implied author who is configured in the work’ (p. 149). We think that White is right in identifying a tension between androcentric texts and the construction of women’s subjectivity.

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is, therefore, necessarily politically situated, whether it is the text of the media, legislation, poetry, music or art. Further, because a multiplicity of texts is constitutive of subjectivity and women’s lived experience, it is arguable that women are constituted by specific historicosocial moments, which bear traces of the past and mark the future. Such an account of experience invokes the idea of multiple textual voices, politically and socially situated in a web of power relations, which will also be stylistically various. In this essay, we will explore the textual politics of feminist biblical interpretation with regard to post-Christian feminism with specific attention to the metaphorical and symbolic ordering of ‘post’ as a marker of excess – of a third way. It is a moment of excavation and reflection which suggests that any form of ‘post’ analysis in an Australian context needs to take specific account of the multiple her/stories and voices that ‘post’-Christian feminism is constituted by, and the ways in which excess and, by implication, containment are positioned. We will begin by examining some of the socio-cultural conditions in which feminist theological discourse is produced and the politics which are in turn produced by two texts, which aim to recover hidden voices. We hope to suggest something of a condition of post-Christianity and the possibilities that such a discourse offers. Situating Australia: Post-Colonial, Post-Christian9 Although post-colonialism is an ambiguous10 contested term,11 trading in a heterogeneity which makes it difficult to ever really define what this means beyond specific instances of expression, there are strong reasons to suggest that issues of national identity and the arrangements of power in contemporary Australia are postcolonial. For the purposes of this paper, we will be using the work of two Australian cultural theorists, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs,12 and their argument that a postcolonial Australia is observable through a series of discourses and public debates/ events which demonstrate the unsettled and contradictory nature of national identity and the re-arrangement of power in ways that untie previously stable (colonial) relationships: self(White)–other(Black), primitive–settler, marginal–centre, man–

9 Rather than represent social analysis as a linear progression of task-oriented forms, we will take a spiraling approach, which aims to keep all points visible and connected to each other. In this way, we may be said to be approaching a (patri)kyriarchal analysis. 10 R.S. Sugirtharajah, ‘The Postcolonial Bible’, Seminar Paper, Harvard Divinity School, 18 November, 1999 (Unpublished). 11 See in particular the essay by Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonialism’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 291–304), which defines some of the perils associated with the use of the term ‘postcolonial’. 12 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998).

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woman, and so on.13 In a post-colonial, post-industrial, globalizing Australia, these dualisms are fraught, intertwined sites; and the claims for national identity are multiple and conflictual.14 For Gelder and Jacobs a defining feature of post-colonialism can be witnessed in some strange – or uncanny – moments: moments where groups which in a colonial arrangement were clearly defined as elite and powerful (pastoralists, mining conglomerates, political parties, developers)15 now constitute themselves as marginal and disenfranchised, arguing that Aboriginal issues and concerns are at centre stage and take up vast amounts of ‘the national concern’ (whatever that might be). The post-colonial moment is when a White educated non-Aboriginal elite utilizes the discourse of minority politics and takes the position usually associated with ‘being Aboriginal’.16 This produces an uncanny effect which results in the destabilization of one’s assumptions about who exactly can claim a ‘proper’ minority status – and we have seen pastoralists, as well as mining companies and developers and ‘mainstream’ Australia do just this, particularly in the development of the new right politics of the One Nation Party, railing against the excess of special government funding to Aboriginal peoples. Further, if wealthy elites are claiming minority-victim status, then what effect does this have on the re-distributive and political powers of democracy?17 It could be argued that what is lost in post-coloniality is polarization as a power strategy in the sense that new power arrangements result in the merge of contradictory categories. For example, dispossession and loss of tradition sits alongside new forms of empowerment where ‘… one can never totally polarize these features (the traditional and the modern, authorization and the loss of authority etc) … [and where] there is no need to equate dispossession so completely with disempowerment. Indeed, new forms of Aboriginal authority may come into being through the very structures of dispossession – precisely because the relations between language and place are so unbounded.’18 Post-colonial politics also produces ‘post-colonial racisms’ which emerge from resentment over the fact that Aboriginal people can command the attention of the non-Aboriginal population. It follows from a (mis)recognition that Aboriginal people now have too much: ‘… too much land surface … too much unverifiable belief … too much power over the nation’s fortunes, too much of an ability to solicit 13 Roland Boer describes post-colonial Australia in terms of overlapping histories of colonialism and post-colonialism: ‘Remembering Babylon: Postcolonialism and Australian Biblical Studies’, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), The Post Colonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998) pp. 24–48. 14 The 1999 November referendum on Australia becoming a republic represents a recent example of conflict and instability, clearly visible in numerous contradictions that emerged including the fact that a significant proportion of the ‘No’ vote was actually not from monarchist supporters but from republicans rejecting the particular republic model on offer. 15 Gelder and Jacobs (1998) refer to numerous situations including those of Coronation Hill, Hindmarsh Island and the One Nation party. 16 Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, p. 77. 17 Ibid., p. 142. 18 Ibid., p. 51.

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the nation’s attention, too much charisma’.19 A good example of post-colonial racism can be found in the discourse on tradition. ‘Tradition’ involves the notion that views and/or sacred sites never change. Meaningful sacred sites are those that can be traced back thousands of years; newer sacred sites or perceived changes in tradition bring scepticism and resentment20 – we might add, a not uncommon response to feminist theologians who challenge religious traditions. If we accept that Australia displays certain post-colonial characteristics, then what can we say of the practice of feminist theology? In what ways is it situated with respect to such arrangements of power, and what of its own specific power relations with respect to racism? What might be some of the links between the destabilizing possibilities of ‘post’ and Christian feminist theological discourse? In the next section we reflect on the discursive possibilities of post. Post: Precisely Post: long sturdy piece of timber or metal set upright in the ground and used to support something or as a marker. Post: after time or in order.21 Post: a marker, a sign, a phallic uprightness, supporting. Supporting what? A flag, itself a marker. Marking what? The land. A marker in the ordering of time, an orderer of time and place. That which signifies order in a wild, untamed, pre-phallic land. The sign of ownership: a link between a European past/present and the grimness of distance and uncertainty in an alien country. Here the sun refuses not to shine; here the sun burns into delicate skin and here the heat oppresses unbearably. Post: after the time of leaving the known, before the time of making the unknown known, after the time of claiming the unknown. How does one claim the unknown? Post: a claimer of the unknown, a movement to a place of uncertainty, of unsettling settlement, an invasion. Yet an invasion that contains the seeds of its own dispossession by its mere inability to contain: the post refuses polarization as it marks the excluded middle, as it is the excluded middle, as it defies A and not-A, as it marks the boundaries and erases the boundaries simultaneously. Is a post always a boundary or is it also a marker of the impossibility of a boundary? This is the centre: that is the margin. What posts along the way to mark the end of the centre and the beginning of the margin? We stay in the centre, a blurry vision of essence marked by the uprightness of phallicism. Now the phallicism of the Word, the Word of Truth. This is a good Word, The Good Word. This is a link 19 Ibid., p. 65. 20 Ibid., p. 73. 21 The New Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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between past/present: this is the acceptance of past/present, the revalorization of what is known, a revisionist claim to Authority and Truth. But look how it marks: look what it marks: its own phallicism, its own oppression, its own refusal of wild possibility, of abandonment of the known for the unknown. Abandon the post, the marker: abandon the Good Word, ineluctably tied to phallic Authority and Truth. Disclaim that Authority and Truth, acknowledge its poison for the Erotic Other, the downtrodden and marginalized. Move to a new time and order; deny the post: make an exodus to a new wilderness where there is new life and freedom. Stay or go. Perhaps there is no choice, perhaps there is not one or the other. Perhaps there is only the certainty that the post, marker of the past, signifier also of the future, cannot be ignored, that its occupation of the excluded middle, that its being the excluded middle, founds the possibilities of departures yet also fractures those possibilities. A post, a signifier leaving its trace always and everywhere in the future, in the beyond that is not yet, points to the excess of itself, its inability to contain the past and the future, yet its undeniable marking of both. A triple figuring: post as marker, post as trace, post as after. And after itself. What does the post take with it and what does it leave behind? What do we want, we, these voices formed by the markings, by the tracings we find inscribed in/on our phallicized flesh? What does our experience tell us of the past, and the future, and the now? How does the post intersect with the experience we feel, we see, we are, and the experience we want as transformative? Can we overcome the phallicized flesh, the word markings that give birth to the phallicism that colonizes, restrains, contains, limits, refuses the possibility of difference and thus of liberation? Can the post move, even as it is in excess of itself, even as it collapses on itself, to transform its own colonizing practices? Post-colonial, post-restraint, post-containment, postlimitation. Post-sameness? And women’s experience: how is this to be re-figured: is it to be re-figured? An escape from the phallicism of the Word? Women’s experience re-figured, women’s subjectivity re-figured, a re-figuration in time and space not yet known where wo/ men, the marginalized and oppressed of the world, will be liberated. Cast an eye to the past and envision, now, the future in the light of the eye cast. Not an isolated eye, decontextualized, but knowing its very situatedness in the complexity of its own historicity. The fragility this knowing brings with it problematizes, yet asserts, that experiential context. Women’s experience emerges from historical pre-figuring, from textual con-figuring.22 How can it be otherwise? Women’s experience is life experience, is lived experience. And lived experience is lived experience of/in the texts that construct us, all of us without exception. Feminist Theology and the Post-Christian Condition Clearly, a state called ‘post-Christianity’ is intimately connected to post-colonialism. In particular, we want to draw attention to the destabilizing effect of the term ‘post’, on the relationship between Christianity and feminism. Rather than suggest, as 22 White, in Morny and Magee (eds), Reclaiming Our Rites, pp. 135–55.

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theologians like Daphne Hampson have, that post equals ‘after’ Christianity (whose effect is to re-polarize exodus/apologist debates and de-legitimate her/story): we would want to argue that post-Christianity actually invites a critical examination of the project of her/story, particularly where specific histories – the histories of women – have been forcibly repressed and which may be sources of liberative moments. Unlike post-modernity which might reject the authorizing canons of modernity and grand narratives, post-colonialism interrogates prototypical texts and canons for the ways in which they have colonized text and subject, and the ways in which they might be reclaimed for the purposes of liberation.23 A post-Christian, post-colonial condition makes it possible for feminist theological discourse to destabilize the relationships between text and tradition, between subject and knowledge. It may allow for the emergence of other, colonized voices, whose histories and stories have been repressed and hidden by colonial powers. This is all good, but if we take Gelder and Jacobs’ claim seriously – that the instability of postcolonialism has resulted in elite groups claiming a marginalized status – we should then be cautious about the potential for feminist theologies to reproduce oppressive forms of text and practices; as well as for feminist theologies to be appropriated by theological (male) elites, and dominant textual practices. In fact we want to suggest that post-colonialism has hardly figured consciously in Australian feminist theological discourse and, as Roland Boer24 points out, the problem with such a lack of awareness is that it can make the strategic realm of the post-colonial more potent if it remains hidden. Signposts to a Third Way: Two Readings If there is a third way for biblical textual interpretation, it clearly needs to be able to engage the politics of late western modernity in quite specific ways, and to be able to respond to the re-organization of power and identity, which bring with it new articulations of racism and sexism. We turn now to two essays which can read as productive attempts to engage text, body, identity and liberation in a post-colonial, post-Christian condition. They signal a shift away from more defensive modes of theology and indicate some of the signposts that might lead to a less defensive theological discourse and an appreciation of the dynamic nature of tradition. Above 23 A further post-colonial connection can be found between modernity as sceptical and pre-modernity as traditional. Modernity unpicks the relationship between knowledge and belief and replaces it with forms of rationality, founded on scepticism, or the non-necessity of belief. Post-modernity unties the polarity of this relationship entirely: and creates a space where the two – belief and scepticism – lie closely together, tangled up, rather than polarized and separate. This condition could be represented as one of (dis)belief. So the conditions in which theology is being produced are contradictory, creating numerous political responses including, for example, the need to reform tradition and/or create new forms of spirituality where tradition is amplified by groups wanting Church reform and those resisting change, and where individual subjectivity is characterized by the ability to both believe and doubt at the same time. 24 Boer, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), The Post Colonial Bible, pp. 24–48.

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all, they are attempts to disrupt dominant narratives – particularly of tradition and text – and make way for other voices, the voices of the ‘other’, whose aim it is to destabilize the normative relationship between Christianity and feminism. I De-colonizing Feminist Christology The first text, by Australian feminist theologian Elaine Wainwright,25 moves towards articulating a feminist post-colonial reading of Christology when she argues that any reading of Jesus will only be useful to the struggles of women when it speaks to women in their specific place of living. That is, feminist theology has greatest authority and integrity when it is embedded in the lived experiences of all women.26 Wainwright argues that there has been a dearth of theologies which have attempted to situate Christology within Australian cultural conditions. That failure to give conscious attention to socio-cultural locations in theologizing has increased the tendency for Australian theologians to participate in a global theologizing which may not touch the specifics of the Australian locale. This situation may have a particular impact in relation to women whose attentiveness to experience has become more acute. Wainwright takes the New Testament text ‘Who do You Say that I Am?’, which has received little attention from Australian theologians yet is a key text in excavating the identity of Jesus.27 A situated reading of this text has the potential to be both dynamically interdisciplinary as well as disruptive to hegemonic articulations of (biblical) truth, particularly in the questions that she is able to generate. Who will speak about the text? Where are they located? What has been said about the text already, and how do those voices – which are silenced the most – become heard? How will these textual interpretations be brought into biblical discourse? Listening to the situated stories of who Jesus might be and how Christology might be connected – to empowerment, oppression and liberation – may make visible those voices in the discourse which are most disadvantaged by the techniques in which knowledge is consumed and distributed. In surveying the field of feminist theology, Wainwright seeks specific evidence for a re-imagination of Jesus from both marginalized and mainstream feminist perspectives.28 She retrieves a rich (and recent) body of feminist texts, which suggests that there is a substantial engagement between feminist accounts of Jesus and cultural forces. Yet while she argues that a feminist Christology needs to make room for many voices, a question remains about whose voices get access to textual domains; how texts are authorized into positions of influence and in particular, how those very marginalized voices that she acknowledges exist, manage to speak. While she does not specifically locate her analysis within post-colonial, post-Christian 25 Elaine Wainwright, ‘But Who Do you Say That I Am? An Australian Feminist Response’, Pacifica 10(2) (1997): 156–72. 26 Ibid., p. 168. 27 Ibid., p. 157. 28 In particular, Wainwright (1997, pp. 156–72) draws on the work of Jacquelyn Grant, Kwok Pui-lan, Virginia Fabella, Chung Hyung Kyung and Anne Pattel-Gray.

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conditions, she certainly invites a theoretical space where marginalized voices are authenticated. If we take Wainwright’s challenge seriously we could expect that difference – cultural, gendered, racial – will lead not only to different Christologies, and multiple claims on the identity of Jesus, but also to a transformation of feminist theology as already constituted under certain racial conditions. II Indigenous Claims to Theological Discourse The second text is that of the indigenous theological scholar, Anne Pattel-Gray, whose most recent contribution to theology marks the beginning of a womanist biblical hermeneutics emerging from the lived experiences of indigenous women in Australia. Like Wainwright, Pattel-Gray29 argues that a biblical hermeneutic will be useful and meaningful when it can recognize oppression – in this case, racism – by interpreting biblical texts which reveal both the presence of racism in the text itself and how this might be relevant to contemporary indigenous struggles for freedom and autonomy. Pattel-Gray begins with contextualizing the conditions in which Aboriginal women have struggled for self-determination. On the whole, she argues that they have been sidelined in the predominantly White feminist movements, and that White women have largely failed to hear the stories of exclusion and oppression of Black women. Biblical interpretation has largely fostered this exclusion, utilizing stereotypes and dualisms to reinforce the polarization of White and Black. She gives examples of the representation of Mary as pure and gentle with Eve as the mother of sin transposed into a White Mary and Black Eve, reinforcing Black as evil ‘other’ and White as desirable and normative in colonial missionary Australia: The church referred to Mary as the ‘ … ever virgin, merciful and tender, the epitome of feminine virtue’. This description was embodied within the ‘ … early Christian, Catholic and Orthodox theology, and by the Virtuous Wife-demure and obedient helpmate to her strong and noble lord in the Reformed tradition’. This became the image with which Western women understood the missionary project. Just as the West understood Mary to give birth to The Word in the life of Jesus, so also did Western women see themselves as bringing Enlightenment to those primitive beings lost in darkness, by accompanying their Christian missionary husbands. Mary became ‘the mother of all good’ … While Aboriginal women, like Eve, were labelled as having no virtue, the White woman, like Mary, was portrayed as having no sin. Because of this, White women became the norm by which all women would be measured and judged. It was considered that Aboriginal women would want to be like her, and would mirror all of her actions.30

In this intersection of race and gender, biblical interpretation has reinforced – or been a site of – colonial relationships. Pattel-Gray observes that this has remained largely hidden in Christian feminist discourse. This then provides an important insight into a critical feminist politics of liberation and the challenge to read texts – using what

29 Anne Pattel-Gray, ‘The Hard Truth: White Secrets, Black Realities’, Australian Feminist Studies 14(30) (1999): 259–66. 30 Ibid., p. 261.

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Schüssler Fiorenza would call a methodology of multiplicative oppressions – as both revelatory of gender and race oppression. Pattel-Gray goes on to read the Old Testament text on Sarah and Hagar31 as an opportunity to reflect on contemporary relationships between White women and Aboriginal women, particularly the authority of Sarah over Hagar and the sexual abuse of Hagar. She defines this relationship as one of slave/owner, a relationship verified by many of the indigenous women who were taken from their Aboriginal families and placed into domestic (indentured) labour. This disrupts a (White) feminist analysis that might claim that Hagar and Sarah claim a similar location as women in patriarchal society. For Pattel-Gray, the most significant relationship is of race determined by Sarah’s exploitation of Hagar: Further into Genesis, at 21:8-21, we find Sarah’s prejudice and contempt have no bounds; her venom and hatred towards Hagar and her son are clearly stated: ‘Cast out this slave woman and her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.’ Now that God had blessed her with a son, Sarah saw no need for her slave and Ishmael to stay, especially if he stood a chance to gain an inheritance from Abraham. Once again we find the Scripture to be problematic, as God is seen to endorse the actions of Sarah and Abraham, and Hagar is discarded and sent into the desert.32

Pattel-Gray argues that the conditions in which (White) feminist theology might begin dealing with the effects of racism lie in the hearing of Aboriginal women’s stories of past and present oppressions33 and a clear understanding of the ways in which racism objectifies and devalues the ‘other’. This is partly an answer to Wainwright’s problematic of bringing the experiences of marginalized women to bear on biblical text: how this actually happens is something that feminists have to work out deliberately and concretely. There is a set of common ideas in the work of Wainwright and Pattel-Gray which signify steps towards a paradigm of listening and understanding, and which could be useful for feminist scholarship. They include: sensitivity to differences in women’s experience and the danger of universalizing this experience through one set of cultural and religious values; the need to deconstruct the category of wo/man and interrogate its usage in texts;34 the need to consider the material and ideological conditions in which (theological) knowledge is produced; the need to consider Whiteness as a category of analysis and its tendency to invisibility; the need to contextualize not only Jesus but also

31 Ibid., pp. 261–2. 32 Ibid., p. 262. 33 Anne Pattel-Gray, ‘Not yet Tiddas’, in Maryanne Confoy, Dorothy Lee and Joan Nowotny (eds), Freedom and Entrapment: Women Thinking Theology (Melbourne: Dove, 1995), p. 191. 34 Chandra Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse’, in Chandra Mohanty, Anna Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 51–80; Kalpana Ram, ‘Too “Traditional” Once Again: Some Poststructuralists on the Aspirations of the Immigrant/Third World Female Subject’, Australian Feminist Studies, 17 (Autumn, 1993): 5–28.

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God, discursively; commitment to excavating lost and hidden histories as central to theological/religionist scholarship. Roland Boer35 has argued that, in Australia at least, colonialism and postcolonialism share overlapping histories. This may have direct implications for any feminist theological work that attempts seriously to excavate and support those voices which are most marginalized. In particular, Pattel-Gray36 makes no claims for a post-colonial condition in the lived experiences of indigenous women. Instead, she claims that racism is as dualistic, polarized and tight as it was 100 years ago. In identifying a ‘third way’ which rejects both apology and exodus, and reads texts as opportunities to open up meaning and possibility, we have posited the idea of a third way as a post-Christian condition. This post-Christian condition should be understood in terms of a state or condition which has the potential to radically destabilize hegemonic discourses of race, gender and theology. Further, that its expression can transgress valorized boundaries of legitimate discursive practice is crucial to fracturing the economy of sameness which informs the interpretation of both text and lived experience.

35 Boer, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), The Post Colonial Bible, p. 24. 36 Anne Pattel-Gray, ‘The Hard Truth: White Secrets, Black Realities’, Australian Feminist Studies 14(30) (1999).

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Chapter 12

Re-Membering Jesus: A Post-colonial Feminist Remembering Satoko Yamaguchi

Introduction: My Context I, as a Japanese Christian feminist, write this thesis from a post-Christian, postcolonial and post-feminist perspective, with the triple ‘post’ meaning not as ‘after’ but as ‘critical’ of dominant discourses as well as, hopefully, of my own feminist thoughts. The term ‘re-membering’ in my title is borrowed from Mary Rose D’Angelo’s article, and it ‘conveys together the idea of bringing what has been hidden out of the shadows of history, of putting together what has been dismembered and of making someone a member of oneself/of the community in a new way’.1 In this paper I hope to invite readers to engage in remembering Jesus in a way to remember a dismembered person into justice-seeking remembrance of today’s faith communities. Here at the outset of my writing, I would like to state my context that led me to my study of historical Jesus.2 For many wo/men in Japan, including myself, Christianity has been both liberating and oppressive. Christian teachings about the dignity of each person and the importance of individual faith decisions before G*d provide a basis for a wo/man who wants to be herself in the culture of kyriarchal group harmony.3 1 Mary Rose D’Angelo, ‘Remembering Jesus: Women, Prophecy, and Resistance in the Memory of the Early Churches’, Horizons, 19/2 (1992): 202. 2 For this section, see further in Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Original Christian Messages and Our Christian Identities’, In God’s Image, 16/4 (1997); ‘The Impact of National Histories on the Politics of Identity: The Second Story’, Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology, 2/1 (1997); and ‘Christianity and Women in Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 30/3–4 (2003). 3 I use the writing of ‘G*d’ ‘wo/men’ ‘patriarchy’ and ‘kyriarchy’ following Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. The writing of ‘G*d’ is to eliminate the male connotation of the writing of God, and to illustrate the ineffability of the divine. The ‘wo/men’ as well as ‘kyriarchy (kyrios[lord]+patriarchy)’ are to illustrate clearly that in ‘patriarchy’ a tiny group of elite males holds power over not only women but also the majority of subordinated men as ‘the other’. The writing of ‘wo/men’ in this way reverses the English custom which always forces women to think whether they are included or not in the so-called generic writing of ‘men.’ I like it also because it points toward the concept of more diverse sex/gender forms, rather than the polarized dualistic understanding. See Laura Beth Bugg, ‘Explanation of Terms (Glossary)’, in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical

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Japanese wo/men, however, have become more aware of the complex influence of Christian teachings on our self-identities.4 Especially powerful is the dogma that the first century person Jesus of Nazareth is the Only Son of G*d the Father, the unique Once-for-all full Incarnation and Revelation of G*d, and the universal Saviour for the whole world throughout history. Such an absolutist and exclusivist expression has oppressive connotations for Japanese wo/men in terms of gender and ethnicity. This renders our spiritual world thoroughly kyriarchal, in contrast to Japanese culture in which the divine is figured diversely as female, male, and as natural beauty and power in various forms. Furthermore, this Christological formulation, introduced by western missionaries and theologians, entailed the identification of authentic Christian spirit with western culture. Thus, the exclusivist and universalistic Christology has not only rendered the non-Christian spiritual and cultural heritage both irrelevant and inferior, but also doubly consolidated the already existing sexism and kyriarchal worldviews as part of divine ordination.5 However, it has been extremely difficult for many Japanese wo/men to radically question and challenge Church traditions. In Japan, Christians have always been a tiny minority group, comprising only one per cent of the whole population. Churches stand in the midst of a non-Christian culture, surrounded by different religious traditions that have much longer history and larger membership. In this particular context, Churches in Japan have always been careful to avoid any sign of syncretism, in order to maintain the authentic pure Christian faith as has been taught by western White elite male theologians. Any challenge to this tradition was perceived as a potentially dangerous slide down toward heresy or syncretism.6 Interpretation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), pp. 207–16. See also J’annine Jobling and Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Review Articles and Replies: Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus’, Conversations in Religions and Theology, 2/2 (2004). 4 By ‘identity’, I refer to our understanding of who we are with respect to various social markers of ethnicity, class and gender as well as some others like age and physical features. Our identity formation is not fixed or permanent but is constantly changing depending on how we evaluate the various social markers in our history and traditions. Regarding the fruitfulness of recognizing women’s gender identities as inseparable from their racial and class identities, see Karen Bodkin Sacks, ‘Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race and Gender’, American Ethnologist, 16 (1989). 5 Chinese-American theologian Pui-lan Kwok points to the similar experiences of Chinese women regarding the Christian influence of western sexism upon them. See Pui-lan Kwok, ‘The Image of the “White Lady”: Gender and Race in Christian Mission’, Concillium, 6 (1991). Regarding the impact of G*d the Father image on wo/men, see Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Christianity and Women in Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 30/3–4 (2003). 6 Contrary to the notion of a pure and authentic Christian faith, recent biblical studies have found abundant evidence that, throughout early history, Jewish/Christian traditions have been actively syncretistic: our spiritual ancestors did not hesitate to learn from different spiritual or religious traditions, and thus deepening and enriching their understanding of G*d in their own ways. See Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 39–44 and the references there. For examples, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York, The Free Press, 1992); Morton Smith, ‘Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in Retrospect’,

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In this milieu I hoped to pursue deeper and richer encounters with G*d not by abandoning the Christian tradition but by critically as well as appreciatively engaging in it. It was because, first of all, my encounter with G*d through a Christian tradition was important for me. At the same time, I was convinced that there had always been many people in our long global history who have experienced true and profound encounters with G*d outside the narrow path of the dogmatic Christian faith. I was also convinced that the G*d we believe in is the creator of the whole cosmos who loves every creature in it and opens oneself for genuine encounters in a variety of measures, not just one time in history, not just for ‘right’ Christians. ‘But,’ I asked myself again and again, ‘can I be a Christian if I do not accept the core of Christianity?’ But then, ‘what is the core of Christianity, by whose definition?’7 In my Church life I learned that the above dogma is the core of Christianity. As I studied theology, however, I realized that the basic Christian dogma was constructed in the fourth century under the authority of the Roman Emperor, after fierce controversies, and later it has been interpreted and articulated further, mostly since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the perspectives of elite western males. My awareness from my own Japanese historical context of political power dynamics makes me suspicious of any authoritative religious formulations constructed under the intervention of political power.8 Although our traditional Christology is claimed to be based on the Christian Testament, its texts do not provide a coherent Christological statement.9 Rather, they provide various and sometimes contradictory information about the earliest Christian faith testimonies. Furthermore, there are some tensions and discrepancies between these messages and later dogmatic confessions. These tensions and discrepancies make me cautious, and lead me to further question what we know of early Christian history, traditions, and of Jesus himself.10 To question a communally accepted core Journal of Biblical Literature, 86 (1967) pp. 53–8; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Wisdom Mythology and the Christological Hymns of the Christian Testament’, in Robert L. Wilken (ed.), Aspects of Wisdom in Judaism and Early Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 17–41. On the other hand, we Japanese have an oppressive history of political intentional syncretism (see Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘The Invention of Traditions: The Case of Shintoism’, In God’s Image, 18/4 (1999)). So, it seems important that we keep alert to such dangerous syncretism on the one hand, but on the other hand, to be open to conscious learning from different spiritual traditions. There may also be much to learn from our ethnic foremothers’ wisdom, especially from their practised religious pluralism. 7 Jane Schaberg, in her article, also asks the same question, ‘[W]hose are these doctrines and dogmas?’ See Jane Schaberg, ‘A Feminist Experience of Historical Jesus Scholarship’ (London: Continuum, 1994), p. 280. See also Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 70. 8 See, for example, Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Original Christian Messages and Our Christian Identities’, In God’s Image, 16/4 (1997) and ‘The Impact of National Histories on the Politics of Identity: The Second Story’, Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology, 2/1 (1997). 9 I use the term ‘Christian Testament’ in place of ‘New Testament’ because the use of the latter reflects the Christian-centric view of the Bible. 10 We may ask ourselves, for example, How have I arrived at my understanding of Jesus Christ? Where and how did I put the legitimating authority, through what kind of people? What are the historical, cultural, and political contexts of those people, and of myself? Of what kind

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of one’s tradition is a threatening experience. It seems surely safer to remain within the handed-down longstanding traditions. If we do not wish to serve the perpetuation of the oppressive and problematic aspects of our traditions, however, we need some courage and commitment. This is the context from where I relate myself to Jesus studies. In the following I will first listen to global wo/men’s voices on who Jesus is for them. Secondly I will overview historical Jesus studies, and then investigate the identity quest and value systems in terms of race, gender and class behind such studies. After this, I will pay attention to some aspects of post-colonial feminist reconstructions of the Sophia movement in which Jesus engaged, and close this thesis with my hopes for a transformation of our communal remembering of Jesus, and shaping of new Christian identities.11 I Jesus for Women around the World Starting mainly since the 1970s, when divinity schools and seminaries finally opened their gates to wo/men, and thus allowing wo/men to study theologies in academic settings, various feminist theologians began vigorously challenging conventional kyriarchal Christian teachings in the Church as well as dominant discourses in academy. Utilizing historical, literary, social-science, ideological and other criticisms from critical feminist perspectives, some theologians radically questioned kyriarchal

of tendencies and/or limitations should I be cautious here? Would my understanding, if shared by the majority of the people, promote justice and peace to socially marginalized people or religiously and culturally very different people? Would such understanding possibly perpetuate or increase oppressive thoughts that serve to discrimination or prejudices against those who are different from me in terms of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation? We need this kind of critical self-examination if we do not wish to remain unconsciously internalized discriminately in thinking and faith. 11 Usually the movement Jesus engaged in is called the ‘Jesus movement’ or sometimes ‘basileia movement’ However, in today’s Christian context, calling the movement the ‘Jesus movement’ itself seems to contribute to perpetuating the idea that it was his movement or that Jesus was the sole leader of the movement. The term ‘basileia movement’ seems better as long as we acknowledge that there were many such Jewish movements around at the time, and the one Jesus engaged in was just one of them. However, again, although this term is a feminine noun in Greek, its meaning ‘kingdom’ evokes a male image. I understand that Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza applies to it the term ‘wisdom movement’ with the purpose of using an alternative to male-defined terms. I also think that we are surrounded by too many male-defined terms, and that we need more female-defined terms ‘to create a “woman”defined feminist theoretical space that makes it possible to dislodge Christological discourses from their malestream frame of reference’. In this paper I use the term ‘Sophia movement’ instead of the ‘Jesus movement’ or the ‘basileia movement’. It is justified in so far as the first Christology was a Sophialogy that understood Jesus as revealing the Divine Wisdom Sophia. See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 1.

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formulations of Christian dogma, and others reconstructed the history of Christian origins in totally new ways to reclaim it as wo/men’s history.12 Around the same time, inspired and encouraged by these new movements and ethos, wo/men around the world began voicing their understanding of who Jesus is for them, based on their life experiences. This meant that, for the first time in history wo/men around the world were voicing their own answers to the Christological question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Mk 8:29). Since the majority of wo/men are outside of institutional theological education, most of them are envisioning Jesus in their faith or spiritual devotion, without making any distinction between Jesus of Nazareth the historical person and the Christ of faith. A Swiss theologian, Doris Strahm, summarized the global wo/men’s voices as follows:13 African wo/men: in their struggles against extreme poverty and oppressive cultural customs, wo/men see Jesus as liberator, healer, companion, personal friend of wo/men, nurturer of life, and as the one who opposed oppressive sexist practices and who still encourages African wo/men for their self-affirmation.14 Asian wo/men: in the continent where over 97 per cent of the population are not Christian, and where the majority of the poor and oppressed are wo/men, Jesus is the one who transcends the kyriarchal order and liberates wo/men. They also hope to develop an understanding of Jesus Christ that is respectful of religious pluralism.15 Latin American wo/men: in their seeking liberation from gender as well as political economic oppression, wo/men stress some aspects of Jesus the liberator which are ignored by male liberation theologians. Women emphasize both Jesus’ criticism of kyriarchal social and religious institutions, and wo/men’s active participation in the Sophia movement.16 African-American wo/men in the United States: among womanists in Black communities who struggle against triple oppressions of race, gender and class, Jesus

12 For example, Mary Daly, (1973); Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutural Relation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982); Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys By Heart. A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988); Bernadette J. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues, Brown Judaic Studies 33 (Chico: Scholar’s Press, 1982); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983). 13 Doris Strahm, ‘Christianity: Feminist Christology’, in Chris Kramarae and Dale Spender (eds), Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge, vol. 1 (New York/London: Routledge, 2000), p. 172. 14 See also Virginia Fabella and Mercy A. Oduyoye (eds), With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1990). 15 See also Virginia Fabella (ed.), Beyond Bonding: A Third World Women’s Theological Journey (Manila: EATWOT & Institute of Women’s Studies, 1993); Hyun-Kyung Chung, Struggle to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990). 16 See also Maria Pilar Aquino, Our Cry for Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993).

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is perceived as the divine co-sufferer who identifies with black wo/men, and is reimaged as a black wo/man who is with them in times of trouble.17 White feminists in the US and Western Europe: in their challenge against western elite male-centered dominant discourses, Jesus is envisioned as a prophet or incarnation of Sophia the Divine Wisdom. Jesus is also a brother, who worked and lived not as an isolated hero but as part of a life-giving and healing faith community. In their relational Christology, Jesus is one of brothers and sisters in the mutually inspiring christic revelational and redemptive relations.18 Thus, at the turn of the century, it seems that Jesus is imaged by wo/men around the world as their ideal liberator figure, reflecting our hopes in the midst of our daily struggles against various forms of discrimination and oppression in our particular historical and cultural contexts. As the severity and bitterness of the oppressive situations surrounding wo/men are diversified and intensified, wo/men seem to imagine the life of Jesus in such ways as to identify him with our modern ideal liberator figures, with ever expanding rich and attractive imagination, and use this image as the basis for their faith and devotion to Jesus Christ. In a sense it is understandable as we observe that the Christian Testament ‘contains not one unique and standard Christology but a plurality of diverse contextual interpretations of who Jesus was for the people believing in him’.19 On the other hand, there are many feminists around the world who have been aware of the dangers this situation involves. To develop christologies by expanding Jesus images abstractly in accordance with one’s own ideal figures, without trying seriously to know the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, can lead us to ignore and distort the personality, life and message of the very person in whom we believe. Contrary to our faithful intentions, such acts privilege our own ideals over the actual life of Jesus himself. Therefore, we need to return to historical Jesus, first of all to do justice to the person called Jesus in whose name innumerable and incompatible claims have been made. Secondly, by deepening our knowledge of Jesus in history, we may become more equipped to evaluate the adequacy and legitimacy of variously made interpretations of Jesus. Otherwise, not only is our faith groundless without historical roots, but also we are defenceless and vulnerable to oppressive teachings and actions made in the name of Jesus Christ.

17 The word ‘Black’ is positively used by them with pride, in contrast to White people’s bias of Black as ugly. See also Jacqueline Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1989). 18 See also Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983); Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (New York: HarperCollins, 1989); Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys By Heart. A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988). 19 Doris Strahm, ‘Christianity: Feminist Christology’, in Kramarae and Spender (eds), Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, p. 172.

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II The Quest for Historical Jesus There have actually been many scholars engaged in the field of historical Jesus studies. Monographs and books have been published one after another on the theme of historical Jesus, but nevertheless, there is almost no consensus among scholars. Here we will look briefly at the history of historical Jesus studies. These studies originated from the quest to distinguish the historical person Jesus of Nazareth from the Christ of faith proclaimed in the Church. Christianity, at least its mainstream, had made the naïve identification of the two before the Enlightenment. Since then, many ‘scientific’ reconstructions of historical Jesus challenged conventional, absolutist, authoritarian and dogmatic understandings of Jesus Christ in the Church traditions, and contributed to the anti-dogmatic renewal of the Church. When biblical studies discovered many parallels and echoes between biblical Jesus and Hebrew scriptural passages, classical Greek hero patterns, and Hellenistic religious stories as well as popular novels, and when Christians could no longer believe gospel stories as historical, the quest to identify the historical Jesus behind Christian dogma increased its importance. That was also to maintain Christianity as a historical religion, in comparison with other religions which were thought to be based merely upon myth.20 The scientific historical critical studies began in the eighteenth century in Germany, and the subsequent vigorous quests for historical Jesus are divided into three waves. The first quest of the nineteenth century ended with the recognition by Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) that the biblical accounts do not tell us about historical Jesus, and that scholars inevitably fashion Jesus in their own image and likeness. The beginning of the twentieth century was called the time of ‘no quest’. In the middle of the twentieth century, the second quest took place, but did not make any significant development. It ended with Rudolf Bultmann’s recognition of the discontinuity between historical Jesus and the Christ of kerygma, as well as with his evaluation that what is accessible and important for modern Christians is the existential encounter with the Christ of faith, rather than historical knowledge of the first century person called Jesus of Nazareth. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the rigorous third quest occurred in the US.21

20 Barry W. Henaut, ‘Is the “Historical Jesus” a Christological Construct?’, in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (eds), Whose Historical Jesus? (Walterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997). Regarding the parallels and echoes between biblical Jesus stories and other writings, see Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 89–92. 21 Historical Jesus scholars count some major factors for the flourishing of this third wave: the epoch-making two archaeological discoveries of the dead sea scrolls and the Nag Hammady library, the development of analytical skills of archaeological evidences, biblical scholars’ teaching positions acquired outside of denominational seminaries which secured their academic freedom from dogmatic concerns, and the increase of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary discourses in the academy. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993); Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994);

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A flood of publications on historical Jesus studies emerged, especially during the last two decades of the twentieth century both inside and outside the US, and this phenomenon did not decline for some time. Scholars emphasize their detached, value-neutral, objective stance as well as their scientific methodologies, and claim the credibility of their conclusions. Then, it should be reasonable to have a considerably high degree of consensus on what historical Jesus looked like. On the contrary, however; there is almost no consensus reached yet. Rather, more and more different and incompatible Jesus figures have been presented as scientific scholarly reconstructions. Some of the representative examples are: an existentialist religious thinker, a rabbinic teacher, a restorational prophet, an apocalyptic prophet, a pious charismatic Hasid, a Jewish universalist, a servant-messiah, a social revolutionary, a revolutionary peasant, a wandering cynic, an itinerant preacher, a Greco-Roman magician, a healing witchdoctor, a folk healer, a nationalist anti-Temple Galilean revolutionary, a marginal Jew, and a wisdom teacher.22 Thus, there are as many figures of historical Jesus as Jesus scholars. Contrary to their claims of detached, value-neutral objectivity of their stances and strictly scientific methods, their scholarly reconstructions of historical Jesus reflect each scholar’s own ideologies. Their reconstructions seem to be nothing more than their ideal images and likeness and/or model projection of ‘the other’, all of which serve

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus : A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (New York: Macmillan, 1968 [1906]). 22 Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, 2nd edition (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1968 [1963]); Gerd Theissen, Social Reality and the Early Christians: Theology, Ethics, and the World of the New Testament, trans. by Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); Geza Vermeses, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (London: Collins, 1973); Bruce Chilton, A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible: Jesus’ Use of the Interpreted Scripture of His Time (Wilmington DE: Glazier, 1984); F. Gerald Downing, Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical Preachers in First Century Tradition (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988); E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985); Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991); Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Marinus de Jonge, Jesus, the Servant-Messiah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, I & II (New York: Doubleday, 1991, 1994); N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993); Seán Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994). Robert L. Webb (1997). Here I would add as examples two representative Japanese male reconstructions that seem not so well known to English-speaking people: A paradoxical prophet who criticized the religious political power structure and declared realization of basileia in the midst of poverty-stricken peasant life (Kenzo Tagawa); a revolutionary prophet who, criticizing religious and political value systems, lived out his life in solidarity with the oppressed (Sasagu Arai). See Takashi Ohnuki and Migaku Sato (eds), History of Jesus Studies: From the Ancient to the Contemporary (Tokyo: United Church of Christ in Japan Board of Publication (in Japanese), 1998).

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for western-centric identity formation.23 Therefore, it is ethically mandatory for all of us to acknowledge that there is no value-neutral objective knowledge possible, and critically examine the contextual and political implications of our knowledge. III Identity Politics Behind Jesus How we understand the founding figure of our faith traditions is deeply connected to the ways we understand the world and ourselves. For Christians, how we understand Jesus Christ has a decisive impact on Christian understanding of G*d, the world, human beings, our history, our lives and lifestyles. That is, the understanding of Jesus Christ forms what Christianity is and who Christians are. The quest for historical Jesus, for Christians, is nothing but the quest for our self-identification. In this sense, it is not only a private spiritual matter but also a highly political matter.24 In this vein, it seems crucial to pay critical attention to the fact that the modern quest for historical Jesus emerged in nineteenth-century Europe at the time of western modernization and empire-building, along with colonization, invention of traditions, as well as systematic racial theories of White supremacy. According to Edward W. Said, Europe had colonized 35 per cent of the nonEuropean world by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and by the end of the following century, up to 85 per cent of the world.25 This vigorous colonization went hand in hand with the rapid invention of traditions. According to British historian Eric Hobsbawn, ‘Traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.’26 For about 200 years, starting in the eighteenth century, the invention of tradition was not uncommon. Such phenomena occurred worldwide, particularly in England, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan. What is the relation between empire-building and the motivation behind the invention of traditions that claims continuation from an origin in the remote ancient 23 Regarding the ‘model projection of “the other”’, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza points to their functions ‘as a commodity for cultural politics and religious edification’. She also cautions that the most serious problem of dominant Historical Jesus studies is their positivist claim that they can be objective and produce a ‘real’ Jesus. See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Open House of Wisdom, A Collection of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza Japan Lectures, trans. by Satoko Yamaguchi et al. (Tokyo: Shinkyo, 2005) (in Japanese), p. 181. Kwok calls this strategy ‘Noble savaging Jesus’, meaning that this provides a foreign but yet tameable model to westerners for their White-supremacy edification to better the European societies. See Pui-lan Kwok, ‘Jesus the Native: Biblical Studies from a Postcolonial Perspective’, in Segovia Fernando and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds), Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998). 24 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York, Continuum, 2000), pp. 42–3 , (2004); Marcus Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 194–5. 25 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 39–41. 26 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1.

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past? There seems to be a significant link between our remembrance of the past and our perceived identities. The myth behind a society’s origins and the shared remembrance of its past shape and maintain social identities. These identities, in turn, affect society’s future visions. Thus, shared remembrance is always highly political, and the invention of traditions served to fabricate remembrance of a society’s past that would help build national identity in such a way as to legitimate colonial expansion for the sake of empire-building.27 According to US theologian, Shawn Kelley, the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries were when western racism was systematized and ‘spread throughout the intellectual and political worlds’ of western society. He states: ‘Racial thinking provides Europeans with the following comforting thought: it is the servile consciousness of the East and the a-rationality of the savages, rather than the brutality of the West, that produced slavery and imperial conquest.’ Moreover, ‘The modern biblical scholarship is trapped in a racialized discourse.’ Kelley’s book, Racializing Jesus, is quite illuminating in terms of why biblical studies, especially historical Jesus studies, are so deeply entangled with not only western racism but also antiJudaism.28 So, here I would like to discuss his study at some length. Racism emerged around the time of the voyages to the New World, and it rationalized and facilitated the conquest of Africa, that continent’s slave trade, the vigorous colonization of the non-European world, and the emergence of capitalism.29 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) maintained that the socio-political hierarchy is grounded in the structure of reason itself, and that reason, having skipped over the continent of Africa, began to reveal itself in the Orient, then moved inevitably upward to the Occident. This is because the Africans as well as the indigenous populations are a-rational and savage, Orientals including Jews are backward and despotic, and Europeans alone are capable of freedom, selfgovernance and authentic culture.30 This racialized world historical narrative found 27 Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘The Invention of Traditions: The Case of Shintoism’, In God’s Image, 18/4 (1999). This article investigates the ways in which Shintoism, claimed to be the archaic pure unique Japanese religion, was actually invented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how such invention of tradition served to consolidate the imperialistic kyriarchal structures of this ‘sacred’ nation, and to justify Japan’s colonization of Asian Pacific nations. Regarding the link between such tradition- or history-making and political identity formation, see also Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Original Christian Messages and Our Christian Identities’, In God’s Image, 16/4 (1997) and ‘The Impact of National Histories on the Politics of Identity: The Second Story’, Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology, 2/1 (1997). 28 Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.16, 32, 211. He distinguishes between ‘heterophobia (generic fear of the other)’, ‘stereotype (preconceptions about a particular group which are then applied to members of that group)’, and ‘racism’, which is a modern phenomenon based upon a social construct of race (pp. 15–17). It was only at the end of the sixteenth century (1580) that the English word ‘race’ was first applied to human beings. ‘Racialized discourse’ is ‘the discursive field out of which racism emerges and the discursive statements that have been infused with the category of race’ (p. 18). 29 Ibid., pp.14–25. 30 Ibid., pp. 47–63.

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its way into the Tübingen school, according to which the Christian Testament is populated with groups of people: the Jews who had the Oriental religion Judaism that had monotheism and empty ritualism; the Western Greeks who had the spirit of freedom, the true founder of philosophy, art and culture; the Christians who emerged after the dissipation of the older spiritual forces of Oriental Judaism and paganism; the Romans who introduced the culture of the Greeks to Europe, but set the stage for the Catholic perversion of the Christian spirit of freedom. Therefore, the task of great thinkers is to peel away the inauthentic Jewish-Oriental and Roman-Catholic coating and recover the pristine, authentic Greco-Hellenistic-Protestant core of the ancient world.31 One would wonder where Jesus stands in this narrative. Jesus was a Jew, and the more research was carried out on first century Judaism, the clearer it became that Jesus was fundamentally Jewish and could be seen just as one of many Jewish sages of the time. This analysis was incompatible with the central dogmatic claims about the absolute uniqueness of Jesus, and the superiority of Christianity. As the solution to this problem, the negative picture of ‘late Judaism’ became an essential strategy for separating and elevating Jesus from his Jewish context. Thus, it was claimed that Jesus was unique in his spirit, and was standing in opposition to his Jewish opponents. Because Jews are hypocritical, unspiritual, backward, despotic, and unfree people.32 This thought, then, was carried forward by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) who was an unwavering lifelong committed Nazi. His long-term close friend Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was opposed to the Nazis, but was convinced that Heidegger’s philosophy offered the best perspective from which to understand the Christian Testament.33 He was central in shaping the critical biblical scholarship in the twentieth century, and in his narrative of the Christian origins, early Christian history followed the general movement of authentic/inauthentic existence. By overcoming the East (its habitual despotic spirit) and Judaism (its corrupt and inauthentic spirit), the freedom and the authenticity of encounter with the original became available, through Jesus, to Paul, the embodiment of the western Hellenistic true Christian gospel of freedom. Then the post-encounter slide back to inauthenticity with the tepid compromise of Jewification was introduced by early Catholicism. Only by expelling the corrupting forces of eastern, despotic Jewification can an authentic pure western essence emerge.34 This thought was then carried forward to the American biblical scholarship, especially into the parable scholarship of Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan. While in this scholarship, the locus of salvific words shifted from the Pauline kerygma to the teachings of Jesus; the racialized idea and the structure of world history remained remarkably similar: ‘A great moment of Western, individualized, 31 Ibid., pp. 64–9. Kelley also points that, although Africans do appear in the Christian Testament texts, they are excluded from Hegel’s narrative of world history, and eventually from the Tübingen construction of early Christian history. 32 Ibid., pp. 70–88. 33 Ibid., pp. 89–92, 131–4. 34 Ibid., pp.129–64.

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primordial, originary authenticity quickly gives way to Eastern, fallen, institutionalized inauthenticity.’ In this scheme of thought, Jesus was a Jew, living in the Jewish world of first century Palestine, but again, he was absolutely unique in his spirit, standing squarely in opposition to his Jewish opponents. Jesus’ parables, according to Crossan, ‘are essentially world-shattering metaphors’ that open up the ‘creative poetic experience’ which is ‘unconventional, profound, and mysterious’. By overcoming the despotic corrupting eastern Judaism, Christianity became the universal religion. Whenever the eastern sensuousness, unforgiving obsession with honour, or worldly ambition threaten Christianity, authentic Christians will return to the true spirit of western freedom inherent in the gospel, the true source of the faith.35 Chinese-American theologian, Kwok Pui Lan, states: New Testament survey books tell us that the first quest for the historical Jesus took place in the nineteenth century. But they do not specify that the quest took place in Europe and there were in fact two quests, not one: the quest for Jesus and the quest for land and people to conquer. Is it mere coincidence that the newest quest for the historical Jesus is taking place in the United States, when the U.S. is trying to create a Pax Americana? 36

By now, a millennium of anti-Judaism and centuries of Orientalism are deeply and firmly rooted in the Euro-centric essentialistic philosophical and ideological system of thought, which permeates the western Christian culture. Therefore, unless we radically confront both the value-neutral objective stance or pretension and the systematically racialized narrative of world history, especially embedded in the historical Jesus studies, not only the dominant theological discourses on Jesus but also those of feminists would buy into the western kyriarchal conceptual network, unconsciously, or even against our intention to the otherwise.37 IV Dis-Illusioning Jesus The western hegemonic discourse of world history, in which historical Jesus studies are deeply entangled, is not just racialized, but also genderized and classdiscriminatory. That this discourse is genderized is especially evident in the field of Jesus studies in its obsessive focus on Jesus as a heroic individual. While scholarly reconstructions of historical Jesus vary considerably, the point that Jesus did not act as a hero is well accepted by the majority of scholars. That is, regardless of the 35 Ibid., pp. 165–214. Quotations are from pp. 212, 182, 183, 184. 36 Pui-lan Kwok, ‘Jesus the Native: Biblical Studies from a Postcolonial Perspective’, in Segovia Fernando and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds), Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), p. 76. 37 Kelley (Racializing Jesus) analyses that ‘The problem resides at the level of discourse rather than intention’ (p. 211). Regarding feminist biblical anti-Judaism, see Judith Plaskow, ‘Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 7/2 (1991) and ‘Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation’, in Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed.), Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1993).

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differences in opinions about what he looked like, be it apocalyptic or existentialist, Jewish rabbinic or Cynic-like, be it prophet, sage, teacher, healer, peasant or revolutionary, scholars agree that Jesus did not live a heroic life alone, nor secluded himself in a desert, but engaged in community-based activities.38 If his ministry was community-based from the beginning to the end of his life, in the culture of corporate identification it is very difficult to distinguish his deeds and words from those of other wo/men in the community and/or movement.39 In the ancient culture of corporate identification, it was a common practice that disciples attributed their words to their teachers, or historians made speeches and put them into the mouths of philosophers in their history writing. Therefore, what we can distinguish with high plausibility is whether certain ‘Jesus’ words derived from the time of the Sophia movement or from the later period, but not whether they are Jesus’ words or not. Besides, in examining the words and deeds of Jesus that are presented in the biblical texts, we have to be cautious not to identify the rhetorically constructed Jesus with the historical Jesus.40 Nevertheless, historical Jesus scholars have kept trying to separate Jesus from other wo/men in the movement, by the endless attempts of identifying ‘authentic’ Jesus words. In this effort, contrary to the original ethos of emancipation from the dogmatic hold, historical Jesus studies are continuing to serve the dogmatic claim of Jesus’ absolute uniqueness. With its strict focus on Jesus alone, they never seriously explore the kind of community Jesus engaged in. Moreover, they have been ignoring and dismissing the scholarship that made the focus shift from Jesus to wo/men in the community. The best example of such dismissal is the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, in which she has restored wo/men’s active participation and substantial contribution in the Sophia movement as well as the beginning of Christianity.41 Until its publication, it was commonly held that all the disciples and apostles of Christian origin were males. Her work totally changed this all-male picture to the very inclusive picture of variously marginalized wo/men. Her scholarly achievement had a huge impact on wo/men in the world, and was immediately followed by many feminist theologians who enriched this inclusive

38 Marcus Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994); John Dominic Crossan, ‘Itinerants and Householders in the Earliest Jesus Movement’, in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (eds), Whose Historical Jesus? (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997). 39 Regarding the culture of ‘corporate identification’, see Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 52–5. In my book I used the term ‘corporate personality’ but later learned the problematic aspects of the use of the term and changed to use the term ‘corporate identification’ instead. See J’annine Jobling and Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Review Articles and Replies: Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus’, Conversations in Religions and Theology, 2/2 (2004). 40 L.G. Bloomquist, ‘The Rhetoric of the Historical Jesus’, in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (eds), Whose Historical Jesus? (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997). 41 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983).

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historical reconstruction of the Sophia movement and Christian beginnings, from diverse aspects.42 Such a scholarship should have had a great impact on knowing what kind of person the historical Jesus was, and we should expect that historical Jesus scholars would have vigorously participated in scholarly discussion with such feminist biblical scholarship. However, we seldom see these feminist theologians’ names and works in the bibliographical references of malestream historical Jesus books.43 What happened, and what is still happening, is the tribialization as well as the appropriation of feminist historical scholarship without attribution. Today most historical Jesus studies presuppose wo/men’s active presence in the Sophia movement in one way or another, but without specifically acknowledging sources of such historical reconstructions, without making due references to feminist works.44 At the same time, the ramifications of such wo/men’s presence in the Sophia movement are not seriously considered in the dominant historical Jesus studies, as if wo/men’s active presence did not make any substantial difference in understanding the Sophia movement nor historical Jesus himself. This kind of trivialization, in turn, serves to perpetuate the genderized Christian myth of world history. That this discourse or Christian myth of world history is also class-discriminatory, in the field of Jesus studies, is evident already in the above-mentioned obsessive focus on Jesus as a heroic individual with its accompanying dismissal or trivialization of wo/men’s presence and contributions in the Sophia movement. In this respect, it seems also helpful to recall an aspect of narrative presentation of Jesus and others in the gospels. It was a commonly used storytelling technique to elevate protagonists by presenting those around them as misunderstanding foolish foil.45 It seems to be 42 See for example, (including some publications preceding In Memory of Her), Luise Schottroff, Let the Oppressed Go Free: Feminist Perspectives on the New Testament, trans. by Annemarie S. Kidder (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993); Elisabeth MoltmannWendel, A Land Flowing With Milk and Honey (London: SCM, 1986); Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Elaine M. Wainwright, Toward a Feminist Critical Reading of the Gospel According to Matthew; and Shall We Look for Another?: A Feminist Reading of the Mattean Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998); Winsome Munro, ‘Women Disciples: Light From Secret Mark’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 8/1 (1992); Mary Rose D’Angelo, ‘Remembering Jesus: Women, Prophecy, and Resistance in the Memory of the Early Churches’, Horizons, 19/2 (1992); Kathleen Corley, Private Women, Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1993); Carla Ricci, Mary Magdalene and Many Others: Women Who Followed Jesus, trans. by Paul Burns (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); Hisako Kinukawa, Women and Jesus in Mark: A Japanese Feminist Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994); Amy-Jill Levine ‘Second Temple Judaism, Jesus and Women’, Yeast of Eden Biblical Interpretation, 2/1 (1994); Claudia Setzer, ‘The Historical Jesus’, Tikkun, 10 (1995). 43 Regarding ‘malestream’ see Bugg ‘Explanation of Terms (Glossary)’, in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001). 44 See Jane Schaberg, ‘A Feminist Experience of Historical Jesus Scholarship’ (London: Continuum, 1994). 45 Mary Ann Tolbert, Sawing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), pp. 41, 221–2.

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one of many aspects that had already been recognized by biblical scholars but were not seriously considered in interpreting Jesus stories in the gospels. These kinds of hero-centric or kyrio-centric Jesus studies have promoted naïve kyrio-centric gospel readings among Christians, that in turn perpetuate the class-discriminatory mindset. There is another example that illustrates how profoundly class-discriminatory as well as sexist this discourse is. That is the fierce violence the American theologian Jane Shaberg faced because of her work, Illegitimacy of Jesus. In this book she challenged the dogmatic myth of virgin birth, with her reconstruction of possible sexual violence that Mary the mother of Jesus suffered, and of a possible traditioning process of this birth story by wo/men in the Sophia movement: as the rumours about Mary’s illegitimate pregnancy circulated, wo/men counteracted them through their storytelling to offer an alternative interpretation of Mary’s giving birth to Jesus. They believed that merciful and gracious G*d of Israel did not leave Mary in despair, and that the Holy Spirit empowered her and worked through her to save her as well as her baby Jesus.46 Her reconstruction was firmly based on scholarly historical criticism as well as literary, social-science, rhetoric, and ideology criticisms, but the dominant historical Jesus scholarship failed to engage in sincere scholarly dialogues with her reconstruction, to further explore various possible implications of this reconstruction in understanding the life of historical Jesus as well as the lives of wo/men in the movement. Such a scholarship not only disposed her work to naïve and/or dogmatic cruel attacks from the general public and Church authorities, but also served to keep the general public under naïve dogmatic faith. It goes without saying that such an attitude served to perpetuate the societal ethos regarding sexual violence that assumes victims’ culpability and that looks down upon sexual victims, particularly female victims of male violence and their children. What does this incident tell us regarding Christian beliefs? From the many questions that occur to me, I would like to mention a few. Isn’t there an implication that the dignity and holiness of Mary would be severely damaged if she were not virgin, but instead suffered sexual violence? Isn’t there an implication that the dignity and holiness of Jesus would be fatally damaged if he were not born of a virgin birth, but a child of an illegitimate pregnancy? Isn’t there an implication that the significance of Jesus’ ministry would be utterly lost if he were not the divine, only son of G*d from heaven above, but a child of a lower class family? Isn’t there an implication that Jesus would not deserve to be addressed as the Christ, the holy one, the son of G*d, or lord, if he was born of an ordinary wo/man who experienced various hardships that were shared by many poor Jewish people in the colonized land of the time? Then, what is the ‘core’ message of Christianity in terms of gender and class? I would like to ask a truly serious theological question: What kind of G*d do we Christians believe in and proclaim?47 Are we not believing in G*d who is life-affirming even to the least of the world? If we are convinced that the G*d 46 Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus; and ‘A Feminist Experience of Historical Jesus Scholarship’ (Continuum, 1994). 47 This question is the central theological question, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1992), p. 156.

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we believe in is the one who would inspire us toward the life of mutual respect, justice, and love, but not of discrimination, marginalization, or hate, I believe we are obliged to examine the ethical ramifications of our beliefs. Then, are we not invited to be dis-illusioned from the profoundly racist, sexist, and class-discriminatory dogmatic Christian myth? Also, are we not ready to dis-illusion Jesus from so many kyrio-centric reconstructions of such dominant or domineering historical Jesus scholarship? V Post-Colonial Feminist Reconstructions of the Sophia Movement In the previous section, I have pointed to the focus shift from the heroic individual Jesus to wo/men in the movement that feminist studies initiated.48 As one of the factors that promoted the kyriarchal mindset among Christians, feminist scholarship has paid critical attention to the kyriarchal nature of biblical texts. Biblical texts were written in kyriarchal societies in androcentric languages that express general things in masculine forms and use feminine forms only when referring to things exclusively related to females.49 For example, when referring to G*d who transcends human sexes, the masculine form is used as the generic form. When referring to disciples or a group of people that consist of both men and wo/men, the masculine form is used. Only when G*d is exclusively imaged as female, or only when a group consists exclusively of females is the feminine form of words used.50 The accumulation of such androcentric usages of words makes female or wo/men’s presence and contributions invisible. Biblical texts also indicate a kyriarchal selection of topics as well as narrative flames and structures that contribute further to wo/men’s invisibility and trivialization. Besides, the biblical texts were written in the ancient oral world when ordinary poor wo/men could not read or write, and only privileged people, mostly men, had access to writing as well as to very expensive writing material. This means that wo/men’s stories and their voices could not survive even if theirs were popularly circulated orally in their storytelling among ordinary people. Furthermore, the canonization process of the Bible turned out to be deeply involved in religious as well as political power dynamics. All of these and other factors contributed to the kyriarchal nature of the Bible, as the document of ‘historical winners’.51 Thus, feminist as well as 48 Regarding the necessity to shift focus and frame of reference from Jesus to the movement, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 21. 49 Regarding androcentric language and wo/men’s invisibility, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 60. 50 These examples look so simple and needless to mention, but it is my experience that seminary and university students always tell me that these ‘simple’ things actually never occurred to them before. It implies how deeply we have internalized the effects of androcentric language. 51 This does not mean to reject messages of ‘historical winners’ nor devalue their voices. Sometimes voices of historical losers seem to reflect stronger kyriarchal thoughts. What I

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post-colonial studies have attempted to retrieve the hitherto ignored voices of wo/ men. In such studies, certain aspects that were often recognized but neglected in the malestream historical Jesus studies have been explored further and presented more clearly in their reconstructions of the Sophia movement.52 It has long been recognized in historical Jesus studies that the Sophia movement practised healing, prophecy, and communal eating, beyond the boundaries of gender and status differences, thus making Sophia’s presence or basileia (G*d’s reign) intelligible here and now among the poor and the marginalized.53 Often neglected or not stated clearly is that these were the practices in which wo/men could actively participate. Prophecy was the practice in which equality by spirit was acknowledged broadly in the Hellenistic world. Both healing and eating were the activities conventionally assumed by wo/men, rather than men, from the ancient times in Israel, and thus wo/men could be resourceful thanks to the wisdom handed-down from grandmothers to mothers to daughters.54 Often recognized but neglected also is that the community they formed was that of brothers and sisters, with mothers included but not fathers, in the midst of a kyriarchal society, and this was a non-kinship based familial community. Such a community should have had an especially liberating impact on wo/men from their kyriarchal social oppressions, as well as on those wo/men who lost their family ties because of their lifestyles or conditions suffered by countless poor families under colonial rule.55 Recent biblical scholarship has discovered that people in the early Christian communities appropriated Roman imperial titles to Jesus in their storytelling. That is, while Roman emperors were addressed as son of g*d, saviour (of the world), father, lord, and sometimes even g*d, all of these titles were appropriated in addressing Jesus in their narratives.56 In this way, they seem to have expressed their faith that the one

am arguing is for a more inclusive retrieval of past history and traditions. Regarding the kyriarchal nature of the Bible and ‘historical winners’, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983), p. 8; ‘oral world and storytelling’, Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 80–96. 52 Satoko Yamaguchi, ‘Historical Jesus Studies from Feminist Perspectives’, in Takashi Ohnuki and Migaku Sato (eds), History of Jesus Studies: From the Ancient to the Contemporary (Tokyo: United Church of Christ in Japan Board of Publication, 1998) (in Japanese). 53 For example, John Dominic Crossan ‘Itinerants and Householders in the Earliest Jesus Movement’, in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (eds), Whose Historical Jesus? (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997). 54 Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), p. 46. 55 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 120–23. 56 Mary Rose D’Angelo, ‘Abba and “Father”: Imperial Theology and the Jesus Traditions’, Journal of Biblical Literature 111/4, (1992); Warren Carter, ‘Contested Claims: Roman Imperial Theology and Matthew’s Gospel’, Biblical Theological Bulletin 29/2 (1999); Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 37–9, 48–50.

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who truly deserves such titles is not the Roman emperor who wielded tremendous power, wealth, and godly authority by oppressing and exploiting people. Rather, for them the only one who deserves such titles is Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified by such power but vindicated by G*d and raised from the dead.57 Often neglected when witnessing such politically committed spirituality is the possible implications for their understanding of basileia (kingdom) as the alternative one, directly opposed to Roman imperial kyriarchal basileia. That Jesus in the gospel narratives is addressed with imperial titles reflects later Christians’ practices of political resistance against Roman imperial rule. We should be cautious whether or not historical Jesus himself had a hierarchical relationship in the movement. Rather, it is open to question whether the Sophia movement practised such a kyriarchal or kyrio-centric teacher–disciples relationship among them. According to Elaine Wainwright, even though both the Greek and Hebrew terms for ‘disciple’ belonged to the Hellenistic period and so would have been common at the time of Jesus, there is no use of the term by Jesus himself. The term is used only in the narrative, and hence it may have been a term developed for the followers of Jesus, by the early storytellers.58 If, as Wainwright argues, the term disciple was commonly used in Jesus’ time, but was not used by Jesus himself, I think it is worth considering that the term was rather avoided in the movement. In the gospels, we find some verses that are strongly critical of hierarchical relations, for example: And Jesus called them to him and said to them, ‘You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great man exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the son of man also came not to be served but to serve … ’ (Mk 10:42-45a//Mt 20:25-28a; see also Mk 9:35).

Regardless whether these words go back to historical Jesus himself or not, they may also convey an egalitarian ethos of the movement, not to be inclined to kyrio-centric relationships. If so, then, it would mean that by using the term ‘Lord’ for Jesus almost all the time, we are practising something completely against the will and practice of 57 See note #59. 58 Elaine Mary Wainwright, Toward a Feminist Critical Reading of the Gospel According to Matthew, BZNW 60 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 330–39. Here she points out also that the term is not used by Paul. While ‘The Twelve’ is used by Paul, according to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, it is not necessarily historical [Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘The Twelve’, in Leonard and Arlene Swidler (eds), Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration (New York: Paulist, 1977), p. 116)] Wainwright says that the identification of the Twelve with the disciples seems to happen in the Markan traditioning and then is taken up by Matthew and others (ibid.). According to the study of Michael J. Wilkins, the term ‘disciple’ in Greek (mathçtçs) and its Hebrew equivalent (talmidh) were both ‘popular terms at the time of Jesus to designate a follower who was committed to a teacher/leader and/or movement.’ [Michael J. Wilkins, The Concept of Disciple in Matthew’s Gospel as Reflected in the Use of the Term Μαθητης (Leiden: Brill, 1988) p. 221; Quoted in Wainwright, Toward a Feminist Critical Reading of the Gospel According to Matthew, p. 331].

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historical Jesus himself and/or of the Sophia movement he was committed to. In relation to this aspect, we should also critically examine the adequacy of the later formulations of Christological dogma that interpreted the above-mentioned imperial titles in apolitical, ahistorical, abstract, and absolutist ways which have served to establish and maintain authoritarian hierarchical relationships in the Church. Recent biblical scholarship has become more aware of Hellenistic religious milieu in the first century. There, among numerous deities both male and female, the former Egyptian wisdom deity Isis was most prominent, and was imaged in a female figure, and at the same time was proclaimed to be inclusive of female and male. Moreover, she was declared to be the one who had been known by different names by different people at different times.59 Often neglected is that, as if competing with such powerful, attractive, and allencompassing universal deity, around this time the G*d of Israel was imaged also in a clearly female figure as the Divine Wisdom Sophia. According to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the earliest Jesus traditions understood the merciful and gracious G*d of Israel as the Divine Sophia, and the Sophia movement identified themselves as prophets and children of Sophia. The wo/men of the movement believed that they stood in the long line of messengers of Sophia who had been sent to every generation. They were sent to those who suffered heavy burdens and injustices, and to the lost children of Israel to gather together at the abundant table of Sophia. In this line of thought, Jesus’ passion and death was not without precedents, and was definitely not willed by G*d, but was the violence done to Sophia’s messengers.60 After his violent death, wo/men in the Sophia movement had an awful experience; but they believed in the resurrection and proclaimed that the merciful and gracious G*d did not leave them in despair but vindicated his/their ministry by raising Jesus from the dead.61 Lastly, it is crucial to observe that post-colonial feminist studies do not idealize the Sophia movement or the earliest Christian communities. As we have seen, the Western hegemonic discourse of world history views the Christian origins as the pristine authenticity that embodied the true spirit of freedom but that quickly gave way to compromises and corruptions, and was thus to be recovered by expelling the Jewification or the Eastern inauthenticity. Totally different from this abstract and idealized view of Christian origins, post-colonial feminist studies recognize that the conflicts and limitations existed from the very beginning of the movement as well as within the earliest Christian communities. The task of later Christians is not the recovery of the authentic origins as the ideal absolute archetype, but to see our Christian tradition as historical formative prototype, and to participate in

59 Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 37, 57–8, and their references. 60 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 97–159. 61 Carolyn Osiek, What Are They Saying About the Social Setting of the New Testament? Revised and expanded ed. (New York: Paulist, 1992); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994), esp. pp. 111–12.

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this tradition appreciatively, critically and creatively.62 In this view of world history, there is no once-and-for-all revelation; rather, there always has been and will be a variety of revelations and manifestations. Could it be that these post-colonial feminist scholarly reconstructions also reflect our ideal images of Jesus, Sophia movement, and Christian origins? I have no intention of denying the possibility. None of us are free from ideological perspectives. However, I would argue that the inclusive historical imagination, which is enriched by various reconstructions from different angles, provides us with more balanced and adequate understanding of historical Jesus and the movement that had long been under the grip of multiple kyriarchal imaginations and interpretations. VI Toward a Communal Re-Membering As we have seen, Christian understanding of Jesus, be it non-academic devotional, academic White–western hegemonic, or post-colonial feminist scholarly understanding, reflects each ideology. Human knowledge is always contextual and has political implications. When we consider the commonly recognized tendency that the founding figures of religious traditions are idealized, absolutized, and claimed to be unprecedented, unique figures, it becomes crucially important that we as Christians examine the ethical implications of our interpretations of Jesus. When we are not mindful of these aspects, we not only uncritically internalize the value system behind such ideal constructions, in historical Jesus’ case the westerncentric kyriarchal value system, but also promote the mindsets that unconsciously despise those of different religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions as inferior or wrong. Such mindsets, in turn, will serve the religious justification and devastation of conflicts, wars, and genocides, contrary to various religious claims of love for the people and peace in the world. The Irish theologian Seán Freyne states: In our post-Auschwitz humility, when Christians want to continue to claim the ultimacy of Jesus, it is the ultimacy of the God of Jesus that they are affirming, not another God who supersedes this God of Israel. The dangerous memory of the Galilean Jesus, engaged as he was in a kingdom-praxis within the very concrete confines of his own social world, ensures that that God is never reduced to a metaphysical abstraction, but is always again to be discovered in the midst of human need, especially when authentic human community is threatened by ideologies of greed or power.63

Observing the human history that is filled with such tragedies, the Filipina theologian Virginia Fabella cautions us with an old saying: ‘Let us not take the finger pointing at the moon to be the moon itself.’ She says: ‘Jesus himself centered on God and the kingdom and not on himself.’ Pointing to the exclusivist and universalist Christologies that were formulated in the fourth century, she argues: ‘The language 62 Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origin (New York: Crossroad, 1983), p. 33. 63 Seán Freyne, ‘Galilean Questions to Crossan’s Mediterranean Jesus’, in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (eds), Whose Historical Jesus?, p. 91.

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and substance of these Christological doctrines betray their historical and cultural conditionings,’ and emphasizes the importance of engaging in sincere and humble interfaith dialogues.64 Many feminists, including myself, without agreeing with all her arguments, still agree with her that such an understanding of founding religious figures and their traditions will lead us to a fuller and deeper understanding of G*d whose variety of revelations and manifestations should have been open to everyone, every generation, and in all parts of the created world. We are living in the twenty-first century, in the environment where it is mandatory for our very survival to have ethical consciousness as the co-inhabitants of a global village. Is it not time, or already long overdue, for us to re-examine our internalized value systems and the ways of knowing our world history, with the cosmological scope of divine creation? Let those of us who believe in the G*d who loves and cares for the whole creation, and who keeps on being present with us throughout history, not be afraid to decentralize our Christian traditions. A decentralization does not in any way decrease the amazing grace we embrace in our traditions and in our communities, but it does increase our perception of the profound wisdom in which we are embraced.65

I would like to conclude my chapter with a proposal to engage in a post-colonial feminist communal remembrance of our traditions, and to re-member Jesus, as well as all the dismembered wo/men in the Sophia movement, and those among us, who continue to work in our justice seeking faith communities. We will continue to reformulate our Christian identities in the diversity of different spiritual traditions, which will inspire us and sustain us in global collaborations for the wellbeing of people of all colours.

64 Virginia Fabella, ‘Christology from an Asian Woman’s Perspective’, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), Asian Faces of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), pp. 216–17. See that many people from very different perspectives agree with this point, for example: John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987); Carter Heyward, Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right: Rethinking What It Means To Be Christian (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, (2004). 65 Satoko Yamaguchi, Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), p. 144.

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Chapter 13

Jesus Past the Posts: An Enquiry into Post-metaphysical Christology Lisa Isherwood

The Christ of imperial absolutes has been under pressure for some time and despite valiant attempts by some of his supporters to follow him into battles – Bush and Blair – he still seems to be struggling to keep control and credibility. This big macho crusher of all that stands in his way has come under pressure over the last few decades but still seems to have maintained some appeal in the global environment. Nevertheless a crisis of identity is occurring in Christological circles amongst those who place so much of their own power and identity within hierarchical Christological constructions. It has to be said that even those who have for many years now been pursuing a more historical path in these matters, those engaged in the Jesus Seminar for example, are having a hard time actually concluding anything about the historical events and reality of the man Jesus. The question then arises, what will a post-Christian Christology look like? Does this seem an altogether too strange and ridiculous question to ask; can there really be such a thing? It is my contention that we have to ask it if we are to take seriously the many posts that have to date been used to analyse the construction of Christ; simply applying them and moving on with a largely unaltered central concept is not honest and does nothing to bring Christology into a real engagement with the modern world. Of course it will always remain true that some will consider the questions of Christology to have been posed and answered in the first century of Christian history. Indeed, this camp will maintain that if Christology is to be seen as authentic then it has to remain rooted in the early years. How then do post-Christian feminists get Jesus past the posts and still retain authenticity? If we do achieve such a thing will we simply be left with a moral teacher, one good guy amongst many, or will there be more to say about the son of Mary? Christology in the twentieth century was a very exciting affair, witnessing huge shifts in method and representation and the emergence of a rainbow of Christ’s which lit our Christian landscapes throughout the globe. Always as a backdrop, we should not forget, was the rather menacing figure of the so-called biblical Christ lying in the armour of right-wing politicians and churchmen the world over; a fascinating juxtaposition of thought, lifestyle and religious engagement. What was happening really was the influence of post-modernism on a discipline that had otherwise not acknowledged that such a movement could have any place within its walls. The bringing into debate and, further, the shift in how we became able to view Christ was indeed a post-modern activity, opening what had been indisputable and absolute

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statements to a wider public for reflection on such truths through the lens of their experience. While we may be astonished that such a thing could happen, perhaps we should not be, since doctrine is nothing more than the fossilization of people’s original reflections on the nature of the divine within their lives. It is then a very welcome move that the fossilization, while of interest in a museum, should be unseated as the only solid foundation for theology and the Church. Indeed, was the Church ever built on solid foundations, emerging as it did from the various reflections on the person and significance of Christ that required the exertion of power and political might to find cohesion? It is not surprising then that much that has been shifted through entering this post-modern debate have been the layers of Christ put in place by such politics and power play. Once the lenses begin to clear, a whole new world of Christological possibility opens up and we are engaged at new levels of understanding and challenge. Our responses are of course varied and open to as much theological debate as the new perspectives provide answers. Many of us are now very comfortable with images of a female Christ, so much so that it is not too exaggerated to say that she does have a place in some mainstream theology and religious imagining. However, the edges of this comfort are met and challenged for many with the introduction of such female images as Xena warrior Christ, or the child prostitute Christ spoken of by Marcella Althaus-Reid.1 We may no longer be surprised to see Christ imaged as a Black man, even an African warrior, or to begin to understand him through the eyes of Native Americans who alert us to the Corn Mother, or Koreans who see him as shamanic or as the dispeller of Han.2 But there are edges, spaces beyond which we find it hard to move. Now I am not suggesting that all theologians or all Christians have moved so far as to be comfortable even with what I see as these modest suggestions in Christological representation. All I am suggesting is that such discourses do have a place in our theology and worship in a way that we may not have thought possible some thirty years ago. However, even in the most liberal circles of theology it is still supposed that there can be a step too far; there are edges to these debates. Where the edges are and why we are thought to have crossed beyond them is of interest to me and may throw some light on where we go with a post-Christian Christology. I think that the lines are drawn around the body; that is to say, when the body gets too vocal in the creation of Christology it has to be silenced or put back in the box, the box in this case being the narrow and restrictive area that we call dualistic metaphysics. As I mentioned above, we can just about cope with a female Christ as long as we are not asked to look at questions of gender; a nice suffering contained figure is fine but a kick-arse, leather clad lesbian warrior is just too much. This can only be too much if we understand incarnation in a dualistic way. Infected as it was so early by Greek metaphysics and dualistic thinking, we have lost the truly transformative power of incarnation, we have contained the glorious passion of the outpouring of the divine within a frame that makes it impotent. Indeed we have framed it and continue to frame it within a grand narrative, that of the overarching and 1 See Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2001). 2 For much more on the many faces of Jesus see Lisa Isherwood, Liberating Christ (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999).

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underpinning insidious narrative of dualistic metaphysics. It seems to me that if we are going to question any grand narratives then we have to question them all and for theologians this causes a problem when we get to this foundational grand narrative since so much of our theological world hinges on it – or seems to. After all, what are we left with if we ditch metaphysics? Well strangely enough, Christian theologians are left with what the early message declared – flesh and blood, incarnation. We are asked once again to look at God in flesh but this time without the distorting veil of metaphysics. We are asked to consider the divine reality of embodiment. Of course this is not as easy as it may seem since the struggle for embodiment is a hard fought one because we have been subjected to alienation within our own skin for far too long through the outworking of the bonds of metaphysics in our psyches and on our skins. In our attempt to claim embodiment as positive, as the stuff of the divine, we have to move beyond the neatly packaged and contained Christ, to a place of uncertainty, a place of new imaginings. We will have to look again with courage and imagination at metaphysics, at the dictation of Word becoming flesh and hijacking wisdom, at risk and what that really requires and at power. We will have to engage with new questions that we never thought possible. Our efforts to see the flesh as word will not be without heartache and some fear since it will announce to us a story of who we are that may be too difficult to hear. Post-metaphysical Christology? Many liberation theologies have been scrupulous about their engagement with dualism, pointing out the social inequalities that such thinking leads to; but they have been rather more reticent in relation to metaphysics, believing, I think, that dualism is a misguided interpretation of and not a necessary outcome of imaging the metaphysical realm as we do. It is, however, my opinion that we do not do justice to the struggles in the life of Jesus and the rich narrative that we have been asked to engage with if we read it through the lens of metaphysics. Therefore, in these ‘post’ days we have to get brutal with metaphysics! After all, it is a huge grand narrative that has held our western thinking in bondage for centuries. As a Celt my landscape begs me to question the hierarchy of worlds; as the mists lie low over the mountaintops it is easy to understand that the gap between the human and the divine is ruah, a breath – or one small step into uncertainty. But what happens to Christology and talk of incarnation if we attempt to take them beyond metaphysics? I have argued that we will come in line with the Jesus movement and the radical praxis of liberation that spiralled amongst his friends and followers if we give up the virtual reality rhetoric of metaphysics and simply get real. I am not arguing that we should give up on utopian visions or that we should even abandon our Christian narrative tradition, only that we should take seriously the story we have told ourselves, which is that God left the heavens in order that the full reality of life in abundance may come to being. In order that we may embody justice seeking, mutual relation and radical risk taking. I am mindful of warnings about abandoning metaphysics; where will we find the critical distance and the necessary alternative perspective if we give up this realm?

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Where will we be ale to create the space for thinking differently? I am not sure that this created space does allow us to think differently since in essence it is a space which is not a healthy place for incarnational thinking and living. Therefore, I stand alongside Mary Daly3 and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza4 when I place my faith in our fantasies and our utopian visions, both of which find fuel in our narrative heritage. But can a case be made for a non-metaphysical, or differently metaphysical, liberating vision spurred on by the powerful memory of the man Jesus and his followers? We are in a place where even with the best efforts of the Jesus seminar we know little about the man Jesus and so we can not, even on safe ground starting here. What we do have are the stories which in my view take on a very different perspective once they are not bearing the weight of enabling us to unravel a biography, a divine one at that. They become resources for our empowerment and not simply faith tales for our salvation. They become sacred in as far as they empower the unfolding and making visible of our divine/human nature. The stories we have told ourselves are truly fantastic and deeply sacred as they stretch our minds and challenge our perceptions even of our own physical reality; they can fuel us and they could, if we really believed them, transform the world. Christianity tells stories of strange, queer transformations, of unstable categories and bodies all enacted through the body of a man who proclaimed ‘God with us’. As Graham Ward5 has pointed out, it is through these many changes from divine to flesh, from flesh and blood to bread and wine and from human into cosmic spirit that Christians suggest the world has been redeemed. We have however contained these engaging stories by believing them only possible if we place a shield of metaphysics and exclusivity around them thus making them stable and clear categories and thereby showing our lack of faith in their transforming power and the power of the body to redeem, of which these stories scream. We have not dared to believe the relatively new and challenging stories that we have begun to tell ourselves and have instead found comfort in the very old stories of hero Gods and how they can, if they choose, save us. Christ becomes an old fashioned redeemer and we can go back to sleep in the comfort of those all-powerful arms. However, this is no innocent sleep, it is a sleep of betrayal, betrayal of our own divine birthright and a selling out of ourselves and the whole of creation. Betrayal because as we sleep we give up our power, becoming disempowered and dependent. We need to find ways for our stories to permeate our whole being, not remain in our heads where we can play with them and remove them from our real consciousness or turn them into comfort blankets. Our narrative heritage is rich, and engages us with the process of our divine embodied. For example, the temptations of Jesus illustrate for me his own rejection of matters to do with the world being worked out in the metaphysical realm. In this story Jesus is invited to turn stones into bread, fly without wings, and most crucially to acquire power in the world while sacrificing his own to another. These suggestions, 3 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (London: Women’s Press, 1986). 4 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994). 5 Graham Ward, ‘The Gendered Body of Jesus’, in Michael Hayes, Wendy Porter and David Tombs (eds), Religion and Sexuality (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).

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which the story tells us were from the devil, were all categorically rejected by Jesus who instead moved amongst people and engaged with them in struggles for justice and liberation. This story placed right at the beginning of the ‘ministry’ of Jesus, that is to say at the beginning where the divine unfolding was situated, screams to us about the true nature of what we call divine and what we prefer to project to another place and space. I think this story is clear that the calling on external power to create a number of nifty tricks is not where the true nature of the divine lies but rather rooting in one’s own divine nature and engaging with others through theirs. It seems then that right from the beginning what Christians have understood as redemption does not occur through cosmic intervention but through passionate engagement with the world and those in it. This engagement being of the raw and persistent kind, the kind that does not rely on external intervention to change things but rather makes and makes again in the struggle that is the divine unfolding. This story shows how easy it is to be God if one is removed from the world and sits above it and how the struggle is for the divine to be incarnate. The essence of the resurrection story is as old as time itself and powerful. It speaks to our depth and tells us what we instinctively know, that in the depth of humankind lies the will to continue, to make and make again, to move and to rise up, to endure and overcome – to find life where it seems lost. And much more than this, to be in relation, since it is only in this way that to make and make again is possible. The story of the resurrection is not complete without the witness of the women at the cross who did not run, but watched in pain and the witness of Mary who returned in love and hope to the place of death in order to witness and experience life. This witnessing and holding the fragmentation in the determination of the hope and work for new life is the essence of this story, and to link it solely with the man Jesus is perhaps to narrow and make small a universally empowering story. If we do see it only through the events of the life of Jesus we reduce its power – it becomes, as has famously been said, a conjuring trick with a bag of bones. And we are only required to believe it or we do not believe it; we are not required to embrace it as redemptive praxis in our lives. Those who ‘witnessed the resurrection’ experienced a powerful memory of a man and his message that is the power to resist embedded in passionate and intimate connection. It is not insignificant that this memory may have been triggered by the breaking of bread together, an embodied communal and enfleshed action, one rooted in sensuality. Through living and sharing their lives and through the power of shared memory and action a stunned and disheartened group was able to rekindle their passion for continued political engagement. This power is not lost with the person; it lives in praxis and mutual relation. Is it too outrageous to suggest that the story of transfiguration signalled the acceptance of the departure of the man but a personal embrace of the erotic power which remains constant? If the Christian story tells us, as it does, that part of God died on the cross, should we believe it and understand this as the all powerful, removed metaphysical divine? Is that what the tongues of fire at Pentecost really symbolized, the passion and empowerment of accepting one’s incarnation through finding a voice? Do we too need to experience a transfiguration of our own, letting go of imagined external power and instead embracing the power that lies in the fibre of our beings; the power that lies within and between us?

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Beyond Metaphysics:Embodying Word! Feminist theologians who engage with bodies celebrate the fact that our stories portray Jesus as a very earthy man sharing touch, engaging with nature, making strong political statements through the symbolic use of food; both during the ‘last supper’ and in the feedings of thousands Jesus enacted shared power and the interconnected nature of flourishing. The actions that are now Eucharistic are powerful political symbols since all receive equally in cultures where inequality of access to food and wealth are blatantly obvious. This man got personal; he used fluid from his body to heal and so truly understood the importance of engaging the body in the struggle for liberation. Heyward6 has developed the idea of Dunamis and erotic connection; and is this what our stories are attempting to engage us in – an intimate and transforming revolution through something as simple and as powerfully frightening as touch? The power of touch has been forgotten and we need to reconnect with our unfolding history of intimacy and empowerment. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel7 and Rita Brock8 are just two theologians who have demonstrated that we can transform the world through touch – the former does close biblical work to highlight how the texts changed subtly over the years and excluded the related nature of the power of touch in such stories as the woman with the haemorrhage; while the latter declares us all to be broken-hearted healers who require the power of touch to transform us and therefore the world. Brock also emphasizes how the healings that we read about as part of our narrative heritage are political – they are not power exerted over but empowerment shared, resulting in the person healed having the power to resist those oppressive circumstances that caused the need for healing in the first place. Sickness highlights many of the dysfunctions in our world and the healer takes these on board; and so do the healed. Both women declare that there is something essential about the sensuality and earthiness of the way in which we are told Jesus engaged with bodies – they suggest that this points us towards sensuality being part of our redemptive praxis and therefore something that we should embody. We should be embracing our own body and the bodies of others in an empowering dance of liberation, not running from flesh for fear of contamination to seek answers set in stone; embodiment poses ever unfolding questions, not answers. Incarnation calls us to deep connection and this, I believe, is best rooted in bodies, not metaphysics. If we look at it this way, the Jesus narrative enables the flesh to become word and is not ‘The Word’ made flesh. The body emerges as a place of revelation and moral imperatives; the place through and between which incarnation continues to unfold. The flesh made word enables us to find a voice and to make our desires known. There are any number of examples of how this vision transforms the landscape of our lives – those who are starving present themselves not as cases for pity but as

6 Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (New York: HarperCollins, 1989). 7 Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendell, A Land Flowing With Milk and Honey (London: SCM, 1986). 8 Rita Brock, Journeys By Heart. A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988).

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moral imperatives for the rest of us, as challenges to redress the imbalances in food distribution; those who are poisoned by toxic waste challenge the ethics of business and profit and call into focus the integrity of the planet as well as people; while those who labour under the genocidal reality of advanced capitalism present their bodies as a moral challenge to find alternative economic systems. When the flesh is word these questions cannot be delayed or avoided. There can be no talk of reward in heaven; the bodies of these people are their heaven or hell, and they will not wait and be soothed by pious utterances and promises of tomorrow. Taking the flesh as word also demands that absolutes be placed to one side and listening take the place of unilateral dictation. Reality is constantly changing and what is required is the liberation of empowered speech and hearing, not the misplaced confidence of eternal answers. The flesh has been silenced by metaphysics, hierarchy and, once and for all, incarnation. The flesh made word speaks, not just from the head but through the whole body, and it is this voice that returns power to people. Of course, it comes with no guarantees of perfect or even desirable outcomes. We are forced to face up to the realities of crushing defeats as well as glorious successes; there is no metaphysical realm in which to hide. Committing to flesh is a risky business; there are any number of outcomes. Whereas metaphysics stacks the deck, incarnation randomly throws us into the possibility of any outcome. However, risking embodiment is perfectly in line with a religion that has incarnation at the heart. The stories of the creation of the world and the crucifixion highlight just how risky; nothing is guaranteed once we commit to life. In both cases we are shown how guarantees of divine success are thrown into question and the freedom required for the diverse divine wonder of creation to manifest is held in the balance – indeed held in the hands of humans. God took the risk of leaping into flesh and risking the on-going co-creativity with humanity dreamt of in the divine yearning, yet we have been encouraged to resist our enfleshment. In short, we have not dared to risk our own divine incarnation, we have not dreamt, we have not yearned enough. Or have we, and do we just silence this yearning with the distractions of things that are easy to take hold of, things that fill our eyes but not our divine natures? Do we consider our dreams the stuff of delusion? Time to take our incarnation more seriously than, it seems, Jesus our brother did. Incarnation acknowledged as risk means that the kingdom, our visions, are always on a knife-edge between the gloriously successful empowerment of ourselves and others, the devastatingly wrong and the mundanely unimaginative. If we are to break out of the hold that oppressive systems increasingly seem to have on the world, then vision empowered by imagination is crucial. We have to be alive to counter-cultural possibilities, to living transgressively. Indeed, we have to incarnate transgression; that is, we have to play with existing categories and break boundaries as we could argue the God of both Jewish and Christian stories did through a moving beyond the narrow confines of guaranteed heavens above. By limiting our incarnational understanding to just one man through rigid adherence to dualistic metaphysics we are in danger of reliving his limitations and prejudices, and we see from the stories that he appeared to have some; the woman with the haemorrhage and the SyroPhoenician woman are just two examples that show that incarnation is not without a context or without need of a helping hand or push in the right direction. Living

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transgressively spurs us on to be limitless and without boundary; it requires that we face imaginatively those erected in our own minds, cultures, religious systems and environments and overcome them through the power of intimate connection. The raw, dynamic energy that exists within and between us is the power of incarnation, the power that can burst out and transform. It seems entirely possible that what the early Christian writers were conveying about incarnation was not a once and for all event but the knowledge that unless we are fully in our bodies we will never be able to fully explore our divinity. Even the early Fathers, as influenced as they were by Greek dualism, understood that Jesus was most fully divine when he was most fully human, that Christ became man in order that all may become divine. I would, of course, like to change their emphasis but accept their vision. It was not the incarnation of the only son of God that allowed believers to achieve union with the divine, but the bursting forth of the divine that makes it possible for all of us to grasp the same power: ‘Anyone who makes an opening as he did wants others to enlarge it.’9 The task then is to bring the power of our incarnation to the forefront, to make empowered living real. Perhaps when we grasp the power of erotic connection between us we will have collapsed the final ‘post’ that dualism sets in place; that is, the metaphysical distance of Christ. Implications of the Post-metaphysical Christ The post-metaphysical Christ moves us away from creeds, doctrines and into a place of living documents – back to ourselves – as the ongoing narrative. Sophia’s children are offered the chance to flourish, to dance within our own skins and to change the world. We are presented with an almost unique chance to expand the spaces that we share and to include all in the story of liberation and the praxis of redemption. All bodies tell a story and the move to post-metaphysics requires that we create spaces in which people may begin to hear their own and to unfold themselves in the light of the communal story and the stories of others. Our praxis becomes fuelled by an enfleshed hermeneutic and we must become experts in ‘reading the body’; this involves a variety of tools from psychology to economic theory since what goes on in them is as important as what happens to them under the weight of advanced capitalism. As a woman I understand just how difficult this can be – deafened as we are by the disorientating babble of consumer cultures, patriarchal expectations and culturally constructed ideologies of gender. The body then is a site on which many varying discourses of power and knowledge are enacted. Indeed, we can find in very ancient philosophy the notion that the body was a means of diagnosis of social and political ills. With a shift to post-metaphysical Christology the body as a site for ongoing incarnation becomes THE site for transformation and flourishing; this can no longer be delayed to a heaven. Each act of love or lovelessness is a part of the redemption we are all incarnating or failing to incarnate. Furthermore, this struggle

9 Joan Casanas quoted in Pablo Richard, The Idols of Death and the God of Life (New York: Orbis, 1982), p. 122.

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now encompasses all areas of life and all that lives. Hierarchies are dissolved, be they moral, sexual, gendered, class or economic, and the whole of creation enters the incarnational dance. So each story, each unfolding becomes a sacred mystery and a moral imperative – the time for close attention to the movement of the divine is now and the place is in each living cell. We have begun the process of unfolding our stories – if imperfectly – by hearing and understanding that the body is situated differently within patriarchal society depending on what type it is – male/female, black/white, gay/straight, disabled/able bodied, the cosmos/humans. We have also become more subtle in our analysis, understanding that class, economics, race, education and orientation are not as straightforward as we once thought and that they play a complex role in the way we are perceived and the way we perceive. We have begun to, painfully, hear stories of abuse of the body through domestic violence, child abuse, war and the inhumane working conditions that advanced capitalism inflicts on us all but most devastatingly on those from the Third World. It is good that we are finding ways to hear and developing modes of resistance and liberation praxis in the face of the reality unfolded in the stories and in so doing grasping more of the incarnation process itself. However, we do have some way to go as the old divisions that linger from the strict metaphysical and ordered world of the distant God still haunt us. As an example, I remember when AIDS was first seen as a theological issue and we quite rightly had bleeding hearts and theological methods at the ready to deal with questions of those who contracted the virus ‘innocently’, through transfusions, as babies and even the odd misguided sexual act. But no sympathy and no theological method for the man who cruised up to 100 partners a weekend – why? Is he not incarnate too, does he not have a theological tale to tell? Was his life and the lives of thousands like him not a good enough site for the unfolding of incarnate within and between us? Marcella Althaus-Reid, who is never afraid of the hard questions,10 has called us to read theology through the bodies of the most marginalized, and her suggestions are exciting and challenging. She brings before us as sites of theological reflection the drag Madonnas’ of Buenos Aires and urges us to write the theology of lovers and battered women and a Christology of prostitution. And of course we must if we are taking incarnation seriously, we cannot worry about decency, we have to embrace diversity in all its challenging forms. These stories have never been heard because they have been buried or purified by metaphysics – we have then lived in a sanitized world from which we still wish to be saved! What we learn in these post-metaphysical days is that the world is not sanitized and cannot be by some vain appeal to the beyond. The world and the unfolding of the divine within it is a messy business, one of partial glory and much inglorious pain, suffering and failure – a great deal of the time there is not even creative engagement with our raw divine/ human natures. But this is perhaps the compelling truth of incarnational theology, the attraction of struggle and the hope of resurrection that lives in the very core of us all. There is more, there is always more and we KNOW it is ours, we do dream, we do yearn and on days when we can be bothered we live as though it matters. 10 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2001).

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Our bodies, so foundationally part of the incarnational drama, tell stories, very complex and challenging stories – they are not all they seem and they surprise us at every turn. Ward points to transformations and boundary crossing as offering a salvific story/example in the life of Jesus. Why should it not be equally so in the theological telling of transsexual or transgendered people – theirs is a real crossing in a world that will have its narrow visions and rigid boundaries highlighted by those crossings. They will, in a very real sense, shed light in the darkness since their very embodied existence will show up our lack of encompassing, our lack of love and engagement with the full incarnational outpouring of the divine/human story. Our vision has been narrowed by our fear – fear instilled by notions of dualism, perfection and ultimate ends. We do not have to embody the Greek virtues anymore; we simply have to embrace the risky, messy, muddled spiralling of incarnation. We do not need endpoints anymore, since incarnation has no end, but rather we need to show courage and imagination for engagement with our unfolding narratives. It is in the living that we embody co-creation and redemption. It is in the struggling flesh that the utopian vision is embodied and the redeeming action plays out. A post-metaphysical Christology appears to be possible. Indeed it may be the reality of incarnational theology since it gives us little option but to engage with the unfolding of our godding through the telling of our lives in the light of a communal story. It is enfleshed and NOW residing as it does within and between us, placed there by the man Jesus and his early followers who invited us all to be a pilgrim, resurrection people through the walk of our divine heritage.

Chapter 14

The Return of the Living Dead Elizabeth Stuart

This chapter attempts to offer an alterative theology to dominant post-Christian constructions of death and the afterlife but one which is nevertheless feminist, queer and post-modern. I am choosing to interpret the term ‘post-Christian’ in a particular way to refer to those theologies which emerged with post-modernism in the wake of the breakdown of the meta-narratives and the emergence of competing multiple narratives. The post-Christian age in the world of theology is an age which acknowledges and celebrates the non-monolithic nature of Christianity. Not only are there only Christianities but there are also only Catholicisms and Protestantisms, there are only theologies and spiritualities. The singular is a modernist illusion. In this wonderful world of diversity and non-universality I am struck by the fact that interest in life after death has almost universally waned or been actively dismissed. This makes me suspicious and I will argue in this chapter that this new orthodoxy deserves at least to be questioned because the absence of a theology of life after death may actually thwart some of the goals of post-Christian theology. I will argue that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to construct a feminist, queer theology of life after death. In her book Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion Grace Jantzen argued that the western intellectual tradition is obsessed with death.1 This obsession is manifest not merely in the ruling elite’s preoccupation with defence and war and in the prevalence of the imagery of war in our language but also in the longing for ‘other worlds’, whether they be heaven, outer space or the possible worlds of modal logic. The fact that we are living in an age and culture of what Philippe Ariès called ‘invisible death’ in which death is hidden from us by all possible means2 is for Jantzen itself an indication that our preoccupation with death is so intense that it results in concentrated avoidance. Jantzen argues that this preoccupation is profoundly gendered and that a feminist reading of the human condition would start not with mortality but with natality – the common human experience of being born from a woman. Her views are similar to those of the feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruether, who has argued that the growth of an other-worldly focus within Christianity was part of a process in which the mortal, female body was devaluated

1 Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. 2 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (London: Penguin, 1981).

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in favour of a male-centred, disembodied spirituality.3 Ruether favours a sort of compost theology of death and the afterlife. She states: By pretending that we can immortalize ourselves, our souls, and perhaps even our bodies for some future resurrection, we are immortalizing our garbage and polluting the earth. If we are really to learn to recycle our garbage as fertilizer for new growth, our waste as matter for new artefacts, we need a spirituality of recycling that accepts ourselves as part of that process of growth, decay, reintegration into the earth and new growth.4

This construction of a theological interest in death and life beyond it as necrophiliac and anti-ecological has attained the status of orthodoxy in European and North American theologies of liberation, now repeated as if obviously true. As Brian Moore has noted, yesterday’s orthodoxy is today’s heresy.5 So that, for example, even though claiming to be rooted in the experience of gay American men, thousands of whom died from AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, J. Michael Clark cannot allow his gay theology to deal with issues of death and the afterlife. Writing in 1997, he said: I have become increasingly adamant about the very real possibility that this life may indeed be all there is … any reliance on validation or vindication in a ‘next’ world encourages us to devalue this world and this life – including all the companion life which we share at the present moment – as only penultimate. A truly inclusive liberation theology, therefore, will not be focussed on the next world, but will articulate better ways to live in this one.6

In 1995 Don Cupitt, founder of the non-realist Sea of Faith movement, published his Solar Ethics in which he used the sun as a metaphor for meaningful living in a non-realist world.7 Cupitt notes that the sun acknowledges no distinction between its living and dying. Indeed, as it lives and projects its living, creating life in the process, it dies and in the process puts on a damn good show. The sun is pure act, it is a performance and it has no life beyond the performance of itself. It gives all it has with no remainder. The sun is self-outing; it has no sense of an ‘inner being’. It simply makes an exhibition of itself. The sun also refuses to discriminate; it shines on everyone and anyone and in itself contains both creative and destructive power. A post-theistic ethic is one in which living is a form of self-outing, a performance given without remainder, a burning out in a blaze of glory. For Cupitt, to live with integrity in the contemporary world means to live like the sun. It means not only accepting but also positively glorying in the transient and mortal nature of human existence. Science has taught us that we are citizens of a cosmos which is slowly burning up and burning out and this is the source of its vitality and we are part of it:

3 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 4 Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Ecofeminism and Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth’, Feminist Theology 9 (May 1995): 61. 5 Brian Moore, Catholics (London: Vintage, 1972), p. 60. 6 J. Michael Clark, Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1997), p. 93. 7 Don Cupitt, Solar Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1995).

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The Sun is nothing but its own self-outpouring and its own continual disappearance into objectivity as the world is lit up and enlivened by it. And we become steadily more objective, and blissfully so, as we get older, thinner, more emptied and outpoured, and so more lost in the objectivity of world-love.8

This means that we must embrace our finitude and accept the radically situated self. We are ‘melted’ into the cosmos and ‘each individual’s world is, for that individual, complete and exactly as long and as broad in scope as the extent of her own life.’9 In a sense, the solar person yearns for death because they seek that which will make them burn, that which will make them outpour in a glorious performance of themselves, so that they will be used up. This new orthodoxy is taken up and fictionalized in the wonderfully engaging His Dark Materials trilogy of Philip Pullman. In the last of the books, The Amber Spyglass, Pullman, as well as killing off an ineffectual, weak God, makes clear that the search for different worlds and layers of reality is dangerous and counterproductive. The two central characters, Lyra and Will, permeate the world of the dead to which all are destined to go, fetched by the Death who comes into the world with them and maintains a discreet presence throughout life until the moment comes for them to tap their charge’s shoulder. The wise do not avoid the presence of their death but learn to befriend it in order that when the time comes the shock is not so great. At death a person’s dæmon (animal-shaped soul) dissolves, leaving the shadow of the person to cross the river into the realm of the dead, a bleak hopeless place. Lyra decides to liberate the dead from their hellish prison and having consulted her alethiometer is able to tell the dead exactly what will happen to them: When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your dæmons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But our dæmons en’t just nothing now, they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of … You’ll drift apart, its true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.10 And though the ghost of a monk tries to persuade the dead that they are in fact in paradise, a young woman who had died a martyr’s death centuries before expresses her resentment at having been asked to give up her life for a heaven that does not exist. She is only too glad to leave this place of nothingness: Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing, we’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.11

8 Ibid., pp. 55–6. 9 Ibid., p. 56. 10 Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2000), p. 335. 11 Ibid., p. 336.

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The first ghost to leave the world of the dead is Lyra’s friend, Roger. He laughs in surprise as he begins to dissolve into the night, the starlight and the air, ‘and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in the glass of champagne.’12 Michael Vasey noted the dominance of such a natural, what Cuppit would call ‘solar’, construction of death in the contemporary British ecclesial culture. The Churches seem reluctant to talk about the state of death itself or what might lie beyond it. Most denominations seem to have been content to hand death over to the scientists, the hospitals, the funeral directors and the crematorium staff, except for the twenty minutes or so of the service where the cultural trend in Britain at least seems to be for a memorial service where the emphasis is on the life of the deceased rather than a funeral service where the emphasis is on the death of the dead.13 My contention is that all this is theologically disastrous. Not because I do not warm to the images of being compost to the earth or dissolved into the atmosphere, because actually I do. I think there is something particularly appealing about what one might characterize as Cuppit’s ‘sunny deposition’ partly because it has echoes of the Christian tradition. Christians have long identified Jesus with the sun. Clement of Alexandria, for example, wrote of Jesus as ‘the Sun of Righteousness’, who drives His chariot over all, pervades equally all humanity, like ‘His Father, who makes His sun to rise on all men’, and distils on them the dew of the truth. He hath changed sunset into sunrise, and through the cross brought death to life; and having wrenched man from destruction, He hath raised him to the skies, transplanting mortality into immortality, and translating earth to heaven.14

Jesus is the one who burns himself out for humanity with no remainder. There is also something in Cupitt’s non-realist spirituality of the sun which implicitly valorizes the very unfashionable but theologically noble notion of sacrifice. The sun dies in its outpouring, it dies in its living and in living its dying it gives life to others. To blaze is then to live outwardly and for others. John Bowker too has argued that Christians should understand their lives and deaths in terms of sacrifice. Life must yield for life and this seems to be the rhythm of the universe.15 There is something immensely life-affirming and fulfilling about Cupitt’s solar approach. The idea that we go down in a blaze of glory, acting out our passion, putting on a good show for the sheer hell of it, enriching our own lives and those of others in the process is light, heartening and romantic. We are like supernovas blazing our glory across the sky or, as the author of the Wisdom of Solomon put it, running like sparks through the stubble (Wisdom 3:7). It is not hard to bow out after having given a good show and expended all one’s energy. 12 Ibid., p. 382. 13 Michael Vasey, Strangers and Friends: A New Exploration of Homosexuality and the Bible (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). 14 Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen 11, http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/020811.htm 15 John Bowker, The Meanings of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 41.

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But then again, like most of you reading this I have lived a long enough and comfortable enough life not to need to hope for more and indeed I have lived enough of a life to hope that there is no judgement beyond death. There is an extraordinary audaciousness verging on arrogance in seeking to dismantle two thousand years of tradition from a position of wealth, comfort and length of life simply unimaginable to huge sections of the world’s population. I have been given the opportunity to shine. There has been enough of me to burn. But many have their lights snuffed out too early or live with such little physical or emotional energy to generate any light or heat. Equally problematic is feminist theology’s efforts to situate the human life purely within the ecological round. This necessarily involves the adoption of a certain fatalism and an implicit acceptance of ‘natural wastage’. It is indeed laudable and an incontestable Christian imperative to fight for life before death for all, but we know that this is ultimately impossible, that millions will die before their time, the victims of hunger, disease, violence, pollution, and bad luck. To buy into a theoecological model of redemption is actually to be prepared to suffer (albeit with pain and regret) such ‘waste’, it is to say that ultimately individual lives have no value to the divine except as some kind of recycled food. Perhaps such a fate is an acceptable, maybe even comforting, one for those of us who create most of the garbage. In offering ourselves ultimately to the great recycler, our guilt at expending too much in the meantime is salved. And those of us who make the most waste are also the ones most likely to live long, comfortable and fulfilled lives. This should make us suspicious of theology which provides too slick an answer to the ‘problem’ of life after death. But my problem with these post-Christian attitudes to life after death does not simply lie in what I would characterize as their hopelessly western and bourgeois foundations. I believe that the absence of a Christian imagination around death has profound repercussions for the way that we live our lives and that some of the mess the Churches find themselves in, for example around gender and sexuality, are the result of a capitulation of the Christian imagination around death to Enlightenment rationalism. In 1977 Dennis Nineham noted that ‘it is at the level of the imagination that contemporary Christianity is most weak’.16 Demythologization, the chief methodological tool of all liberal theologies, does nothing for the imagination. Our culture yearns rather for remythologization and re-enchantment, a possibility which the post-modern with its breakdown of the liberal rationalistic meta-narratives age allows. While most post-Christian theologies dismiss any notion of life after death as hopelessly patriarchal and irrational, television programmes such as ‘Charmed’, ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘The Ghost-Whisperer’ suggest a cultural consciousness of and interest in other worlds. Feminist theology has also prided itself on taking women’s experience seriously. What then is it to make of the fact that, in a study conducted in 1995 in Britain, in which less that a third of the people questioned took the view that ‘nothing happens, we come to the end of life’ and 34 per cent professed belief in the passing of the soul into another world, women were almost twice as likely as men to believe in some sort of afterlife and much more likely to feel the presence of 16 Dennis Nineham, ‘Epilogue’, in John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM, 1977), p. 201.

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the dead?17 It is too easy to dismiss such beliefs as the dregs of patriarchal religion or the fantasies of those yet to have their consciousness raised. It is easy to fall into a version of the cold dogmatism it seeks to resist. Catherine Pickstock has made the point that if our culture is necrophiliac it is because it has separated death from life in order to preserve a life immune from death. She argues, ‘in seeking only life, modernity gives life over to death’ because we can only love that which is destined to die.18 The Christian tradition is actually far from being necrophiliac precisely because it is rooted, not in death, but in the conquering of death; this is what Easter is all about and it is the loss of this tradition that leaves us in so many theological muddles around, for example, sexuality and gender. Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. An icon of melancholy, of love unknown and stolen from her. To see inside the tomb she has to bend and there she is confronted by presence and absence mischievously combined. Angels greet her with a performance which the cloud of her melancholy does not allow her to ‘get’. The tableau they create is of the Ark of the Covenant and in particular its mercy seat. God promised to meet his people ‘from between the two cherubim’ which edged the mercy seat (Exodus 25:22). Cherubim are engaged in the queer act of guarding something which is present and absent at the same time. Any clear distinction between presence and absence dissolves between their wings. The woman approaches them blind to their significance, wrapped in her performance of grief. They tease her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ (John 20:13). The question is designed to pierce through her performance, to make her see them, to feel their presence and his absence which is also his presence. But she cannot, she turns away from them and towards a stranger who also asks her the same teasing question ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?’ (John 20:15). But still it bounces off her grief. She still seeks the one she could not have. It is only when the stranger calls her name that she feels the presence. And what does she do? Remember the many images produced of this moment in western art, ‘Non Mi Tangere’, Mary reaching out to the risen Christ who backs away; remember and then think again because the author of the Gospel of John tells us that when she heard her name, Mary ‘turned herself’. She had already turned to him when she emerged from the tomb, so now she turns away. She speaks not to his presence but to his absence. In a reversal of the divine encounter with Moses, the woman turns her back on her God who has himself been hidden in the rock (Exodus 33:17-23). Perhaps her gaze is refocused on the cherubim who guard the absent presence and who wink back with glee at her sudden understanding. The male/ female gaze is broken and this is reinforced by the words of Jesus, ‘Stop clinging to me’. All clinging is ended. Genesis 2:24, ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh’ is shattered with death and resurrection. St John’s account of the resurrection connects more clearly than 17 Douglas Davies, ‘Contemporary Belief in Life After Death’, in Peter C. Jupp and Tony Rogers (eds), Interpreting Death: Christian Theology and Pastoral Practice (London: Cassell, 1997), pp. 130–42. 18 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1998), p. 104.

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any other of the canonical gospels the end of death and the end of sex/gender. The scene repeats with critical difference the creation of male and female and the bonds of marriage in Eden. Here in a different garden, the man does not return to dust but returns from dust to life, here male and female do not cleave unto one another but let go of one another. Here in the rush of resurrection the gaze that has been historically hardened into the structures of heterosexuality is broken. This scene is repeated in the rite of baptism. In the Tridentine Liturgy for the Easter Vigil, the celebrant divides the waters in the form of a cross and says the following: … Who by a secret mixture of His power renders fruitful this water prepared for the regeneration of men (sic), so that those who have been sanctified in the pure womb of this divine font, and born again as new creatures, may come forth a heavenly offspring; and that all who are distinguished either by sex in body or by age in time, may be brought forth to the same infancy by grace, their mother.

Into the chaos of death are the baptized plunged, taking with them their distinguishing marks, their sex and age to be reborn ‘to the same infancy’ by grace. Baptism repeats the scene in the cemetery garden, the turn, the breaking of the gaze. This is why Paul, widely believed to be citing a baptismal formula could declare: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). The cleaving is now not between male or female but the soul/Church and God. This is the primordial marriage, the leaving behind of the life of constructed identities for a new type of belonging determined only by God. Stephen Moore has recently explored the queering of the Song of Songs in early Christianity as theologians like Origen and later Bernard of Clairvaux read the text as an allegory of the soul’s relationship with the divine.19 Marriage is de-sexed in the radiance of the resurrection and its repetition in baptism. Resurrection repetition in baptism and in the annual renewal of the baptismal vows enables the coming into being of resurrected life, at least in theory. In practice, of course, Christianity has clung to gender as to dear life and more recently has sold its soul to contemporary constructions of sexuality and gender and found itself out of step with its foundational rhythm of death and resurrection. The prayer referred to above was cut when liturgy was reformed in the Roman Catholic Church. Judith Butler has argued that in dominant contemporary western culture at least gender is ‘a kind of melancholy’.20 From Freud she takes the notion that melancholia is unfinished grief, indeed grief that cannot be completed or resolved. The connection between gender and melancholia lies in the construction of the subject in contemporary western culture. For Butler the subject is constructed upon loss; ‘a certain foreclosure of love becomes the possibility for social existence’.21 To be, then, is to be heterosexual or homosexual and both identities demand the loss of certain 19 Stephen D. Moore, God’s Beauty Parlour: And Other Queer Spaces In and Around the Bible (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 21–89. 20 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 21 Ibid., p. 24.

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types of love which are not named and not mourned. The contemporary subject is therefore grounded in grief, in loss. For Butler a key element in the subjection of subjectivity is the turn. The turn of the subject to or on itself, the response to being hailed, the embrace of irresolvable loss is an essential movement in the production of the subject. The figure of Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus is a melancholic figure. She mourns for love that is impossible, the unresolved grief upon which gender depends and the impossible love for Christ which is further compounded by the absence of his body. The cherubim and then Christ himself both draw attention to and offer the possibility of escape from the melancholia of gender through the appellation, ‘woman’ and the question ‘why are you weeping?’ In her turn towards the man she believes to be the gardener, Mary repeats the turn towards a subjectivity grounded in melancholy, reinscribing it upon her body. But the calling of her name awakens her to the reality of resurrection and her second turning disperses the subjectivity of subjection, dissolves melancholy and ends gender. She addresses her teacher not face to face but in the space between the cherubim, and he breaks the bonds of gender. Sarah Coakley has argued that Butler’s project of causing ‘gender trouble’, disrupting the performance of gender by repeating those performances with critical differences so as to reveal their nature as performances, has much in common with the ancient ascetic tradition within Christianity.22 Furthermore, she argues that Butler’s focus on the loss and unacknowledged yearning that underpins desire, coupled with her belief that it is possible to transcend the limits of gender through unconventional performances, suggests an unconscious reach towards the eschatological which could release Butler from the never-ceasing round of parodic performance which is the only catalyst for change she envisages. Coakley brings Butler into dialogue with the early Church theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, who also sought to transcend the contemporary constructions of gender. Gregory envisaged the resurrected body as non-sexed and the progress towards it involving a series of ‘gender switches and reversals’ which Gregory plays out in his Commentary on the Song of Songs.23 For Gregory, of course, the goal of this process is union with the divine and the necessary threshold to such union is death. However, death in Gregory’s theology is not a terrifying threshold into the unknown because the ascetic life is an anticipatory performance of life beyond it and so is the Eucharist.24 Nevertheless, death is the threshold onto the life beyond gender, the life of resurrection. Butler is not at all concerned with death or what might lie beyond it. This is something she has in common with much contemporary Christian discourse. What is clear to me as it was to Michael Vasey is that the absence of an afterlife deprives the Christian mind of a space beyond heterosexuality and homosexuality. It leads to, or at least allows, the identification of discipleship with heterosexual relationships and family life in dominant ecclesial discourse (and homosexual relationships in the reverse resistant discourse), and with such identification comes the collapse of the religious life and 22 Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Blackwell: Oxford and Malden, 2002), p. 159. 23 Ibid., p. 165. 24 Ibid., p. 163.

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the celibate vocation which challenge it. There is a great forgetting of the Church’s ‘queer’ tradition when death is evaded. Butler has always been careful to recognize that even though gender might be a matter of performance, it is impossible to live outside of the gender scripts which repetition writes upon our bodies: ‘The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.’25 Repetition with difference, critical difference, is the key to exposing gender as a matter of performance and offering the possibility of ultimate transcendence. Similarly, no one can avoid death. This is a repetition into which humanity is locked as long as it lasts. We are born, we live and we die. Sometimes this whole process can take but a few minutes, sometimes it can take a century or more, but whatever our lifespan the process of decay begins the minute we are born and it will reach its end. Death shadows our life, eventually overtaking our steps. We all participate in the dance of life and death, repeating the rhythm in our own bodies, acting out the script of death. At yet the Christian performance of death must be different. Christians die along with the rest of humanity but not in the same way. For the Christian, life and death are queered, indeed this is at the heart of Christian praxis. Mary Magdalene at the tomb encounters the defeat of death. God has embraced death and thereby defeated it. Hell is harrowed into non-existence. Whatever death now involves it does not herald the absence of God, the source of life, for there is now no place where God is not. Death is not in dualistic relationship to life any more than male is to female; in fact both death and life are deconstructed in the blaze of resurrection. In the resurrection, God overwhelms death with life but does so as a mortal human being. We all know that there is something about death that is sticky; the death of one recalls the death of another and as we move through life the ball of grief gets larger, a heavy weight upon our souls. To Christ attached the stickiness of all human death, grief and sin. It was not just that God defeated death but that God did so in human flesh and this has profound implications for flesh itself. It bursts from the tomb, the same but different, a flesh no longer meant for cleaving nor for oblivion. Christians die, their bodies wear out or fall vulnerable to disease or violence but a Christian death is a death with critical difference. For the Christian, death no longer promises or threatens oblivion, the absence of God, it does not even threaten the end of bodiliness but rather death becomes a physical experience/encounter with the divine. For Ladislaus Boros death is profoundly sacramental: ‘Death should be looked on … as a “basic sacrament”, mysteriously present in the other sacraments … As the supreme, most decisive, clearest and most intimate encounter with Christ … death summarizes all other encounters.’26 The sacramental nature of death is lost in most contemporary British funeral rites and practices where the mourner has replaced the deceased as the locus of attention and the sense that the congregation is there to pray for and witness an encounter between God and the dead, as they 25 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 148. 26 Ladislaus Boros, The Moment of Truth: Mysterium Mortis (London: Burns and Oates, 1962), p. 165.

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witness the sacrament of marriage or baptism, is absent. In some crematoria, for example, the dead are even sidelined, positioned to one side of the podium. Many Protestant funeral rites, of course, steadfastly avoid prayer for the dead. The dead can often be an awkward presence at their own funeral, to be acknowledged only through remembrance, through a recollection of a life, constructed as a story now ended. An embrace of death as sacramental, as a passage into a profound encounter with Christ, would involve some changes in the contemporary dominant Christian culture of death in Britain. The deceased would become the absolute focus of the funeral liturgy as she or he is, for example in the funeral rites of the Orthodox Churches, and the congregation would construct themselves less as mourners (‘why are you weeping?’) than as witnesses and as advocates as they are at weddings, filled with awe, love and some sadness but not hopeless grief, as they pray for the person on their pilgrimage beyond this life. We would also have to relearn to perform death, to prepare for death as we would for a baptism, confession, confirmation or an ordination. The dying (and that includes us all) would be encouraged to look forward to our deaths, to reflect upon it so that it can be embraced when it comes. We need an Ars Moriendi for our time in which we queer cultural constructions of death to reveal the sacramental nature of dying. Christians must learn to perform ‘death’ badly from a cultural point of view. We die but we are not consumed by death. We die to live and to live more fully than we do now. Our dead are not lost to us but remain part of the Church. Their story continues. This is the tradition of the Church but it needs to be constantly performed through practice. But death is not simply something a Christian encounters at the end of their life. There is a sense in which Christians have already died and gone to heaven and those theologians who have conceded to others the argument that a focus on death and beyond leads to a pie in the sky theology which bolsters rather than challenges social injustice have rather missed the point of baptism. Through baptism Christians are sacramentally united with Christ, and the performance of his death and resurrection is repeated upon their own bodies, the stickiness of Christ’s nature is realized. Death and resurrection are written on the bodies of Christians, their very characters are shaped by this drama (a fact symbolized in the wearing of a cross and in the act of making the sign of the cross) because they are part of the ongoing performance of it. The last things are also the first things for Christians, the defining movements of their characters and lives. Christians queer death by embracing it and experiencing it as soon as they can and by living through it. Christians imitate the present absence/absent presence of the tomb. They live within and are shaped by culture but there is also a sense in which they are absent from it, orientated towards and in receipt of another world, an alternative reality. Similarly, though absent in death, those who have died continue to live and to be present to those united with Christ. The nature of the performance required of the baptized is always going to be a complex issue, but two things are clear: first, that the ontological change affected by baptism, in which selfhood is grounded in Christ, requires a performance of humanness critically different; and second, that there is no room in the baptized soul for melancholia. Death is dead. Grief is not part of the Christian performance.

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221

I once went to a Robbie Williams concert. When the time came for him to sing his popular hit ‘Angels’ he sang the first line and then sat down while the audience sang the song for him. It was a transcendent moment. The song had transcended the singer/songwriter, the audience transcended their atomistic selves and became one voice and the process was one of sheer joy. The spiritual nature of the experience was enhanced first by the song which is of course about angels and by Williams himself who introduced it by saying: ‘Pick up your hymn sheets and sing along.’ The joyous transcendence of community singing reaches its peak in the Eucharist where mortals join their voices to angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim and the whole company of heaven, not just in the Sanctus but also in the whole act of Eucharist. For in the Eucharist the shadow of death disappears altogether and earth and heaven are united in the marriage of the lamb. The power of the Eucharist lies not in its dramatic rehearsal of the last supper nor in its anticipation of a reality to come; the power of the Eucharist lies in the rent veil between God and humanity, heaven and earth, death and life. This ‘eschatological thrust’ has been highlighted by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharista: … in celebrating the sacrifice of the Lamb, we are united to the heavenly ‘liturgy’ and become part of that great multitude which cries out: ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!’ (Rev 7:10). The Eucharist is truly a glimpse of heaven appearing on earth. It is a glorious ray of the heavenly Jerusalem which pierces the clouds of our history and lights up our journey.27

Scott Hahn has drawn attention to the close connection between the book of Revelation and the Eucharist, the Eucharist reflecting the heavenly worship described in the Apocalypse.28 From the fact that it takes place on a Sunday through to the presence of priests, altars, vestments, incense, bread and the reading of scripture, the making of penance, the sign of the cross, the singing of glorias, allelulias and the sanctus, the presence of angels, saints and Mary and, of course, the Lamb of God, the Eucharist reflects the heavenly liturgy described in Revelation. The Eucharist is heaven. In the Eucharist the participants experience the defeat of death and the reality to which they move. For a long time only the baptized could participate in the consecration because only they had been through death and marked with the sign of the cross, the sign of victory over death; they enter heaven and engage in the activity for which they have been made, the praise of God. In the Eucharist worshippers repeat the resurrection scene at the tomb. The priest leads the people in a turn away from a world of melancholic grief (‘Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more’ Revelation 20:12), which is also a world of gender, towards the new creation. The worshippers gaze upon an altar in imitation of Mary’s gaze at the tomb. In some traditions the altar is literally a tomb containing the relics of martyrs in a sepulchre set into the stone (again this imitates the presence of martyrs under the altar in John’s vision (Revelation 6:9). But the altar does not remain empty, the critical difference of this repetition is that 27 John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharista (Rome: Vatican, 2003), para. 19. 28 Scott Hahn, The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

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the Lamb takes its throne upon the altar in the form of bread and wine. Christ has ascended to his Father. We may not cling to his gender but we can now taste, see and smell his presence. Presence is realized but gender is still rendered absent. And not just two angels, but the whole court of heaven, saints, martyrs and the dead gather to join in the feast. It is in the Eucharist that the Church laughs because it is in the Eucharist that the Church encounters resurrection. In the Eucharist the Church camps it up along with the angels. The surfeit of heaven reaches earth and pushes aside space and time; death has no sway, all identities save that given by God rendered non-ultimate. It is in the Eucharist that we learn what our ultimate destiny is. We learn that our gaze is orientated to the Lamb, to the altar/sepulchre surrounded by angels; this is the end and fulfilment of all desire. Here the space outside the Eucharist is exposed as a place of want and lack, a place of endless repetition, of yearning, of desire that can only be repeated, never fulfilled. In the Eucharist baptismal identity is renewed and fulfilled, in the Eucharist death is transcended and angels and mortals become one in activity, intention and desire. In the Eucharist we are as angels in heaven. In the Eucharist the primordial marriage between Christ and soul, the Lamb and the Church is celebrated, to be reflected and anticipated in love between persons of any gender. Jantzen, Ruether, Cuppit and Co. have got it wrong; the choice that the Christian tradition presents us is not a choice between life before death and life after death but a life lived in the shadow of death and a life in which death has been defeated so that dying ceases to be death but a movement into a life which can be anticipated now in the sacraments. Far from being a male patriarchal obsession, meditation on this process in the tradition has resulted in a profoundly radical approach to gender, an approach the Church needs to hear in the midst of its stalemated debates of sexual orientation and gender. We need to recover a vision of heaven which will enable us to live better lives and die better deaths.

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Index

Abram, David, 58, Althaus-Reid, Marcella, 8, 105, 109, 117, 202, 209, Anderson, John, 60, Anderson, Pamela Sue, 6, 11, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 35, 37, 95, 102 Aquino, Maria Pilar, 183 Armour, Ellen, 1, 2, 15, 27, 30 Asad, Talal, 29, 32 Atkinson, Wayne, 56 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 56

Collins, Patricia Hill, 183 Condren, Mary, 9, 134, 136, 137, 147, 149, 153, 155, 157 Cone, James, 93 Cooper, David, 28, 37, Copeland, M. Shawn, 93 Corley, Kathleen, 192 Cornis-Pope, Marcel, 74, 79 Crosby, Donald A., 67 Crossan, John Dominic, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191, 195, 198 Cuomo, Chris J., 53

Bal, Mieke, 101 Bass, E, 56 Bataille, Georges, 91. 118, 119, 121, 122, 125 Beattie, Tina, 13, 93, 94 Bell, Diane, 141, 143 Benjamin, Jessica, 125, 126, 127, 163 Bloomquist, Gregory, L., 191 Boer, Roland, 170, 173, 177 Bologh, Roslyn, 129 Borg, Marcus J., 185, 186, 187, 191 Boulding, Elise, 158 Bourdieu, Pierre, 32 Brenner, Athalya, 76, 79, 80 Brock, Rita Nakashima, 183, 184, 206 Brooten, Bernadette J., 185 Brown, David, 33, 34 Brown, Joanne Carlson, 148 Bultmann, Rudolf, 185, 186, 189 Buttigeig, Joseph A., 73, 77

D’Angelo, Mary Rose, 179, 192, 195 Daly, Mary, 5, 16, 108, 142, 183, 204 Delbridge, Arthur, 63 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 28, 36, 151 DiCenso, James, 20 Donaldson, Laura, 5 Donini, Elisabetta, 63, 65 Douglas, Mary, 134 Downing, F. Gerald, 186 Durkheim, Émile, 9, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141

Campbell, Joseph, 149 Carter, Warren, 195 Casanas, Joan, 208 Chilton, Bruce, 186 Christ, Carol, 5, 7, 42, 45, 47, 52, 141 Chung, Hyun-Kyung, 174, 183 Clarke, Peter, 19 Colebrook, Claire, 108, 109

Elvey, Anne, 7, 53, 55 Erickson, Victoria Lee, 9, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 158 Erikson, Erik, 158 Exum, J. Cheryl, 101 Fabella, Virginia, 174, 183, 198, 199 Farley, Wendy, 93 Fernández, Josefina, 227 Fetterley, Judith, 72 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 11, 17 Foucault, Michel, 160 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 105, 119, 132, 150, 154, 217 Freyne, Seán, 186, 198 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 99

242

Post-Christian Feminisms

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, 180 Gaard, Greta, 61 Gebara, Ivone, 5, 7, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 65 Geertz, Clifford, 227 Gelder, Ken, 169, 170, 173 Gellner, Ernest, 31 Gendreau, Bernard A., 54, 55 Giddens, Anthony, 135 Girard, René, 136, 149, 151, 163 Goodenough, Ursula, 67, 180 Gore-Booth, Eva, 164 Gottlieb, Roger S., 67 Grant, Jacquelyn, 184 Gray, Frances, 9, 90, 167m Gray, J. Glenn, 155 Griffiths, Tom, 59, 60 Grosz, Elizabeth, 152 Hampson, Daphne, 5, 6, 25, 26, 89, 90, 108, 167, 173 Harris, Harriet, 34 Hart, Kevin, 54 Heider, Martin, 85 Henaut, Barry W., 185 Heyward, Carter, 183, 184, 199, 206 Hick, John, 199, 215 Hobsbawm, Eric, 187 Hollywood, Amy, 15, 27, 28, 30, 32, 36, 37 Honner, John,. 67 Horsley, Richard A., 186 Hume, David, 17, 19 Hume, Lynne, 130 Irigaray, Luce, 1, 7, 9, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 63, 65, 67, 68, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 108, 130, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 156, 157 Isaksson, Eva, 224, 229 Isherwood, Lisa, 4, 8, 9, 19, 109, 117, 201, 202 Jantzen, Grace M., 11, 15, 27, 90, 95, 134, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144, 211, 222 Jasper, Alison, 93 Jay, Nancy, 9, 129, 131, 133, 134, 136, 143, 147, 151, 153, 154 Jobling, David, 101 Jobling, J’annine, 7, 89, 90, 97, 102, 180, 191

Johnson, Elizabeth A., 58, 64, 65 de Jonge, Marinus, 186 Joy, Morny, 27, 132, 135, 168 Kanyoro, Musimbi, 78, 86 Keller, Catherine, 61, 62, 67, 68, 81, 82, 83, 88, 168, Keller, Mary, 27 Kelley, Shawn, 188, 189, 190 King, Richard, 231 Kinukawa, Hisako, 192 Kristeva, Julia, 9, 20, 95, 99, 100, 101, 130, 132, 133, 137, 138, 143, 147, 148, 154 Kwok, Pui-lan, 1, 3, 5, 174, 180, 187, 190 Laffey, Alice, 76 Langton, Marcia, 60 Lee, Dorothy, 167, 176 Lehmann, K., 54 Levine, Amy-Jill, 77, 192 Lyon, David, 130 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 25, 29, 33, 36, 38 Mack, Burton L., 186 Maddox, Marion, 3 Mauss, Marcel, 28 McClintock, Anne, 3, 169 McFague, Sallie, 5, 64, 65 McIntyre, John, 54 McKim, Donald K., 54 McPhillips, Kathleen, 9, 55, 90, 129, 130, 167 Murakami, Haruki, 81 O’Carroll, John, 4 Ohnuki, Takashi, 186, 195 Olkowski, Dorothea, 108 Ortega, Ofelia, 86 Osiek, Carolyn, 197 Palmer, Michael, 17 Pattel-Gray, Anne, 9, 167, 174, 175, 176, 177 Peterson, Michael, 11, 12 Petty, Michael W., 67 Phillips, Dewi Z., 14, 15, 16, 17, 22 Plaskow, Judith, 190 Plumwood, Val, 42, 53, 57, 61, 65, 66, 67 Priest, Ann-Marie, 67, 68 Primavesi, Anne, 58, 63, 65

Index Przybylowicz, Donna, 73, 75, 77, 88 Quinn, Philip L., 15 Radford Ruether, Rosemary, 7, 25, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 53, 64, 89, 211, 212, 222 Rahner, Karl, 54, 67 Ram, Kalpana, 176 Raphael, Melissa, 5, 97, 134, 137, 142, 143, 144 Rees, Alwyn, 235 Reich, Wilhelm, 166 Ricci, Carla, 192 Richardson, Frank C., 74, 75 Rigby, Kate, 53 Rizzuto, Ana-Maria, 17 Ruddick, Sara, 158, 165 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 7, 25, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 53, 64, 89, 211, 212, 222 Sacks, Karen Bodkin, 180 Said, Edward, 3, 187 Salleh, Ariel, 53 Sanders, E.P., 186 Schaab, Gloria L., 89 Schaberg, Jane, 181, 192, 193 Scholes, Robert, 74, 79, 83 Schottroff, Luise, 192 Schroer, Silvia, 77, 78 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 5, 167, 168, 176, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 204 Schweickart, Patrocinio, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 88 Scott Peck, M., 162 Segovia, Fernando F., 90, 187, 190 Seremetakis, Nadia, 141, 142, 143 Setzer, Claudia, 192 Shiel, Fergus, 56

243

Shiva, Vandana, 53 Sjöö, Monica, 237 Smith, Morton, 180, 186 Soskice, Janet Martin, 94 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 80 Strahm, Doris, 183, 184 Stuart, Elizabeth, 10, 19, 108, 211 Swinburne, Richard, 13, 14, 16 Sydie, Rosalind, 129 The Bible and Culture Collective, 78, 79 Theissen, Gerd, 186 Thomas, Keith, 13 Tilley, Terrence, 14, 15, 17 Tolbert, Mary Ann, 187, 190, 192 Tracy, David, 153 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Trible, Phyllis, 76 Turner, Victor, 238 Van Wolde, Ellen, 238 Vardy, Peter, 30, 31 Vermeses, Geza, 186 Wainwright, Elaine M., 9, 167, 174, 175, 176, 192, 196 Wallace, Honor McKitrick, 99 Ward, Graham, 20, 33, 144, 204, 210 Weber, Max, 4, 129, 135 Welch, Sharon, 238 West, Gerald, 86 White, Erin, 163, 168, 172 Wilkins, Michael J., 196 Wright, N.T., 186 Yamaguchi, Masao, 163 Yamaguchi, Satoko, 9, 179, 180, 181, 185, 187, 188, 191, 195, 197, 199 Yeats, William Butler, 147