Is the Christian Tradition Good News for Women?
I would like to approach this topic through thinking about hermeneutics ie. theories of interpretation. How you answer the answer the question, ‘Is the Chrsitan tradition good news for women?’ depends on how you interpret it. In what I say, I am guided by debates within interpretation theory on what value we give to traditions.My approach is in 3 parts:
In brief, these two basic stances can be summarised as follows. Those who are positive towards traditions argue their case this way. Traditions form us and orient us towards the world at large. We are born into culture, language and history and are owned by them before we come to a conscious knowledge of them. Our appropriate response is one of trust and avowal, an “Amen”, a humble acknowledgment and thankfulness for what has, like a womb, given us life and made us human.
To ask about the truth of a particular tradition is not to stand back from it, as a self-determined, autonomous self (as if one could) and to apply some method to it. Truth is not something that we grab or grasp, but something that grabs us. The experience of being grasped by something you have read is evidence that you are already formed at some pre-conscious level, and desire to understand that better. The text speaks to you, and in reflecting on it, you come to understand something about yourself and the world and the human condition etc.
Living in a tradition is like being immersed in a game. The individual players do not control the game; rather, the rules of the game control the players. The game includes, but transcends, the individuals, who are played by it. It is by playing the game that we discover what it holds. St. Augustine once said that people came to him saying that they want to understand Christianity in order to believe. He said to them, ‘Believe, so that you may understand’. In other words, it is by living the Christian life that the truth of it will be discovered.
In this positive assessment of the Christian tradition, both women and men gain from engagement with its scriptures, with the signs and symbols of the liturgy, and all the theology and biblical commentary that has been written over the ages. One could argue that we should be more careful with inclusive language, and with allowing women to have the same responsibilities and status as men in the church, but the defiant stance of the feminists does not really belong here. What is called for is a kind of humility whereby one not only seeks to interpret the tradition, but also to be interpreted, or grasped, by it.
This is not to imply blind obedience to the Christian tradition, or that we should forfeit our powers of reason. Rather it means that criticism is subordinated to a basic humility and trust.
On the negative side, traditions are approached with suspicion. They are seen as carriers of ideologies and interests, and although they might form us, at their worst they deform us. Traditions are seen as ‘systematically distorted expressions of communication under unacknowledged conditions of violence’. Those critical of traditions aim to unmask their ideologies and interests, and to liberate people from their hidden distortions, their violence and domination.
Suspicion in part comes from personal experience, from traumatic experiences as a child, for example. But I am wanting to understand the suspicious stance from the way we think about traditions, and this comes from the critical social sciences. For example, from Marxism, Freudianism, feminist theory, post-colonial theories, deconstructionism etc. These sciences are critical by constitution. They are particularly concerned with the concept of interest, that is, that you can’t pretend that people and knowledge are not guided by desire, by what people want, especially in wanting to safegueard their privileges. A critical look at a tradition seeks to expose the interests that underlie the enterprise of knowledge. Related to this is the concept of ideology, whereby so-called disinterested knowledge conceals its interest through rationalisation. Real motivations are covered up. Language gets distorted to serve particular interests. Although language can be a medium of understanding as we saw in the previous section, it can also be ‘a medium of domination and social force. It can serve to legitimate relations of organised power, and one would be naďve to ignore the fact that language serves social and political interests.
One feature of ideologies is that they are not self-evident to the people who have them. The application of an explanatory theory is needed for ideologies to be named and recognised. For example, psychoanalytic theory analyses ideology in terms of illusion (not merely error), projection (of a false consciousness) and rationalisation (where self-interested motivations are given the appearance of a rational justification). Feminist theory names the Christian tradition as androcentric (centred on men), patriarchal (upholding a system of male power) and at times misogynist (women-hating). Feminists argue that the language of fathers, sons, brothers and men, and the male imaging of God, is hard to change because it serves the interests of male power in the church. The more hardline feminist critique is that, for women to stay in this tradition is bad for their soul. In Mary Daly’s terms, a woman cannot belong to this tradition without assenting to her own lobotomy.
It is all very well to humbly put oneself under the authority of the Christian tradition and seek to find its truth by living it, but the truth of an ideology will not be found without the application of critical theories. And if this is not done, the institutional church will continue to pass on its ideologies and to deform and do violence to its members.
You may well ask at this point, if all knowledge is guided by interests, what interest guides the critical social sciences? The answer is, an interest in liberation – free (not distorted) communication, liberation from false consciousness, political emancipation and the end of censorship, domination and violence. Feminism applied to Christianity is not necessarily a wounding in order to kill, but can be, as it is for me, a critique in order to heal or redeem the tradition so that it will be good news for women.
2. Trust and suspicion in dialogue
Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher of hermeneutics, argues that these two views of traditions will remain in tension, but need not be polar opposites. He wishes to retain the perspective that we are born into and owned by traditions before we own them. When it comes to interpreting texts, this means that it is not just a matter of the reader grasping the meaning of a text, as if the reader holds the key. It is also an experience whereby a reader knows himself or herself to be grasped by the text and interpreted by it. ‘To understand is not to project oneself into a text but to expose oneself to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds that interpretation unfolds…’. What Ricoeur advocates, though, is a recognition of the distance between, say, the scriptures and my own world’s time and place, a recognition that should prevent a naďve assimilation of the text to my world, and allow the critique of ideology to take place before one settles for a certain understanding. What are being critiqued here, for Ricoeur, are both the reader and the text, a mutual exercise where each is allowed to interpret the other. Hence a certain humility needs to be retained.
In relation to critical theories, Ricoeur defends their importance, but makes the point that criticism does not come from no-where. There is no place outside of traditions in which to stand and criticise them. One does so from another strand within a tradition, or from a different tradition. In his words,
Critique is also a tradition. I would even say that it plunges us into the most impressive tradition, that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the Resurrection. Perhaps there would be no more interest in emancipation, no more anticipation of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of mankind.’
The idea of liberation is an empty one if it is not based on examples from the past, brought to us through traditions. What we hope for needs some sort of precedence, so that we know that the possibility of freedom exists, deliverance has happened to slaves, that betrayal and violence and death are not necessarily the last word. ‘…eschatology is nothing without the recitation of acts of deliverance from the past.’
Seeing the importance of both the critique and the avowal of traditions, and the limitations of keeping them in opposition, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutical theory in which both have a place. He does not give critique the first or last word. For one, critical theories are reductive, good at explaining particular phenomena (economic relations for Marxism; the workings of unconscious desires for Freudianism; patriarchy for feminism), but should not be expanded to totalising world views. The meaning of a particular tradition always exceeds one particular explanatory theory’s field of competence, and should not be reduced to it. Further, these explanatory theories are themselves traditions which are carried to us in our language, culture and history in which we belong. They are therefore on the same plane as the traditions they are trying to interpret, and need to be incorporated within a hermeneutics of tradition, not opposed to it.
Thus Ricoeur advocates a three-stage process of understanding-explanation-understanding, also referred to as a dynamic movement from first naivete, through critique, to a second, post-critical naivete. This final stage is important, he says, for unless the process ends with understanding, it remains sterile. It will not be related back to life. ‘Beyond the desert of criticism we wish to be called again’.
For Ricoeur, then, hermeneutics is ‘animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience. In our time we have not finished doing away with idols, and have barely begun to listen to symbols’. By incorporating both explanation and understanding, Ricoeur is allowing for both suspicion and retrieval, iconoclasm and new possibilities for being. ‘The idols must die – so that the symbols may live’. This is constructive for Christian feminism which seeks to both listen and suspect, be humble and defiant.
I would therefore not give a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question, ‘is the Christian tradition good news for women?’, for the criticism has to occur before the avowal.
3. The crucified Christ as a tradition of critique
In this section I am suggesting that, within the Christian tradition we have a radical critique of all forms of power that distort and do violence and are death-dealing. We have this critique symbolised in the crucified Christ, particularly in Paul’s understanding of the cross. Let me explain.
Before his conversion, Paul was a zealous defender of the Jewish Law. His commitment was such that he ‘persecuted the church violently and tried to destroy it’ (Gal 1:13) and ‘breathed threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ (Acts 9: 1). He was an enemy of the Christian gospel, and would have justified the crucifixion of Christ and the persecution of the church under Jewish Law. What happened, that he was changed from being an enemy of the church to an apostle of Christ crucified?
Paul describes his conversion experience as a vision, where he was confronted with ‘Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting’ (Acts 22:8). Paul came face-to-face with the victim of his zealous violence, and was confronted with the question: ‘Why do you persecute me?’ At the same time, Paul came to understand and to proclaim this Jesus as the Son of God (Acts 9:20). The connection was powerful, and a life-changing event for Paul. It meant that under the Law, the Son of God had been killed. Therefore, the Law itself was put in doubt, not invalidated altogether, but only insofar as the law led to the kind of violence that crucified Christ. ‘Through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God’ (Gal. 2:19).
Paul’s conversion was from identification with the perpetrators of violence to identification with the victim. The crucified Christ became for him a mirror whereby his own violent desires were reflected back to him in Christ’s suffering. To identify with the victims of violence generally is to learn the truth about what human desire is capable of, not merely on the person level but institutionally as well. When this victim is the Son of God who died as a curse under the Law, we are given a view of the Law gone wrong, and we have human sin mirrored back to us.
Paul’s own zeal and the Law he served had murdered an innocent man. Having drawn that conclusion he went over to the side of the victim. Instead of continuing the crucifixion he joined the crucified. The revelation of the significance of the Cross uncovered the sacred violence in the institutions of this world.
Hamerton-Kelly interprets the cross as a sign of God’s justice – not that God required a victim, but that God never did and does not now condone violence, scapegoats, sacrifices or other acts by which human order is purchased by means of victims. The cross mirrors back to us, not God’s but human wrath and vengeance, transferred to the divine. ‘To represent our wrath to us is to give us the opportunity to take responsibility for it, and make the proper changes…To imitate the crucified is to renounce violence and embrace the other in self-giving love’.
In the crucified Christ as mirror of God Paul is giving expression to an experience of judgement and of grace. His sin, and the sin of any human institution or relationship that is founded on the sacrifice, scapegoating and victimage of others is judged. God has sided with the victims against the principalities and powers. Yet Paul also understands that he has been offered forgiveness and mercy and reconciliation with God. This is his gospel to others.
And when you were dead in trespasses…, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it (Col. 2:13-15).
We have here echoes of Augustine’s theology of the cross. What he saw as being revealed there was the moral emptiness and the destructiveness of power that is not preceded by justice and good will. What was held up for all to see, ‘made a public example of’, was that an innocent man had been killed. Thus the powers that killed Christ were shown to be bankrupt, and the grip they had on people was disarmed.
Paul expresses his conversion in terms of a new-found freedom. Released from the law that leads to death, he now lives by the Spirit that gives life. Understanding that the whole of the law is summed up in the commandment to love (Gal. 5:14), Paul advocates living by this power and no other. ‘But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life in the Spirit’ (Rom. 7:6; cf. Rom. 8:2ff). ‘For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery…For in Christ Jesus…the only thing that counts is faith working through love’ (Gal. 5: 1ff).
The crucified Christ as mirror of God is both example and sacrament of God’s love for us. It is how God wants us to love, and enables us to be free of the desires that cause violence through loving the wrong things (power, status, our own egos, glory in the eyes of others). When we are put right with God, we can let go our desperate neediness. This is the positive side of the mirror of the crucified Christ, of love poured out for us, that saves us – from ourselves.
For me, the Christian faith is good news for women as it contains within it the interst in freedom and right relations which are what feminism is also all about.
Heather Thomson
Canberra, August 2000.