Abstract: Why Women's Studies in religion? To answer this question one must first survey the historical and sociological reality of women's participation in religion. One must start with the fact of women's historic exclusion from religious leadership roles in Judaism and Christianity and their consequent exclusion from advanced and professional theological education preparatory for the roles of clergy and teacher in these traditions. One could document similar histories in other world religions, such as Islam, but in this discussion we will speak primarily of Judaism and Christianity.Many examples of this exclusion of women from leadership, teaching and education can be cited. One thinks of the dicta in Rabbinic Judaism, “cursed be the man who teaches his daughter Torah,” or the comparable statement in the New Testament, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silence” (I. Tim. 2, I 2). Historically women were excluded from the study of Torah and Talmud that led to the rabbinate and which, as devotion, was considered the highest calling of the Jew. In Christianity the calling of the celibate woman diverged somewhat from the traditional view of women's limitations. But the education of women in monasteries was generally inferior to that of men and usually lacked the component of secular and classical learning which was regarded as inappropriate for women. When the educational center of Christendom shifted from the monastery to the university in the twelfth century, women were generally excluded. The northern European university particularly was a male, clerical institution.The seminary is a later institution that developed after the Reformation, when universities began to be seen as too secular to provide proper theological formation for priests and ministers. Generally they have been slow to open up to women. Oberlin was the first. Its theological school allowed a few women to attend in the 1840s, but at first they were not permitted to speak in class. Methodist and Congregational seminaries had a few women by the late nineteenth century. But prestigious seminaries like the Harvard Divinity School did not open its doors to women until the 1950s. Jewish and Catholic women began entering their seminaries even later.The exclusion of women from leadership and theological education results in the elimination of women as shapers of the official theological culture. Women are confined to passive and secondary roles. Their experience is not incorporated into the official culture. Those who do manage to develop as religious thinkers are forgotten or have their stories told through male- defined standards of what women can be. In addition, the public theological culture is defined by men, not only in the absence of, but against women. Theology not only assumed male standards of normative humanity, but is filled with an ideological bias that defines women as secondary and inferior members of the human species.Many examples of this overt bias against women in the theological tradition can be cited. There is the famous definition of woman by Thomas Aquinas as a “misbegotten male.” Aquinas takes this definition of women from Aristotle's biology, which identifies the male sperm with the genetic form of the embryo. Women are regarded as contributing only the matter or “blood” that fleshes out the form of the embryo. Hence, the very existence of women must be explained as a biological accident that comes about through a deformation of the male seed by the female “matter,” producing a defective human or woman who is defined as lacking normative human standing.Women are regarded as deficient physically, lacking full moral self-control and capacity for rational activity. Because of this defective nature women cannot represent normative humanity. Only the male can exercise headship or leadership in society. Aquinas also deduces from this that the maleness of Christ is not merely a historical accident, but a necessity. In order to represent humanity Christ must be incarnated into normative humanity, the male. Only the male, in turn, can represent Christ in the priesthood.This Thomistic view of women is still reflected in Roman Catholic canon law where it is decreed that women are “unfit matter” for ordination. If one were to ordain a woman it, quite literally, would not “take,” any more than if one were to ordain a monkey or an ox. Some recent Episcopalian conservatives who declared that to ordain a woman would be like ordaining a donkey are fully within this medieval scholastic tradition. Whether defined as inferior or simply as “different,” theological and anthropological justifications of women's exclusion from religious learning and leadership can be found in every period of Jewish and Christian thought. Sometimes this exclusion of women is regarded as a matter of divine law, as in Old Testament legislation. Christian theologians tend to regard it as a reflection of “natural law,” or the “order of nature,” which, ultimately, also is a reflection of divine intent. Secondly, women's exclusion is regarded as an expression of woman's greater proneness to sin or corruption. Thus, as in the teaching of I Timothy, women are seen as “second in creation but first in sin” (I Timothy 2,13–14).The male bias of Jewish and Christian theology not only affects the teaching about woman's person, nature and role, but also generates a symbolic universe based on the patriarchal hierarchy of male over female. The subordination of woman to man is replicated in the symbolic universe in the imagery of divine-human relations. God is imaged as a great patriarch over against the earth or Creation, imaged in female terms. Likewise Christ is related to the Church as bridegroom to bride. Divine–human relations in the macrocosm are also reflected in the microcosm of the human being. Mind over body, reason over the passions, are also seen as images of the hierarchy of the “masculine” over the “feminine.” Thus everywhere the Christian and Jew are surrounded by religious symbols that ratify male domination and female subordination as the normative way of understanding the world and God. This ratification of male domination runs through every period of the tradition, from Old to New Testament, Talmud, Church Fathers and canon Law, Reformation Enlightenment and modern theology. It is not a marginal, but an integral part of what has been received as mainstream, normative traditions.The task of women's studies in religious education is thus defined by this historical reality of female exclusion and male ideological bias in the tradition. The first task of feminist critique takes the form of documenting the fact of this male ideological bias itself and tracing its sociological roots. One thinks of works such as Mary Daly's first book, The Church and the Second Sex (Harper, 1968), or the book I edited, Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (Simon and Schuster, 1974). These works trace male bias against women from the Scriptures, Talmud and Church Fathers through medieval, Reformation and modern theologians. They intend to show that this bias is not marginal or accidental. It is not an expression of idiosyncratic, personal views of a few writers, but runs through the whole tradition and shapes in conscious and unconscious ways the symbolic universe of Jewish and Christian theology.The second agenda of feminist studies in religion aims at the discovery of an alternative history and tradition that supports the inclusion and personhood of women. At the present time, there are two very distinct types of alternative traditions that are being pursued by religious feminists. Within the Jewish and Christian theological academies, the alternative tradition is being sought within Judaism and Christianity. However, many feminists have come to believe that no adequate alternative can be found within these religions. They wish to search for alternatives outside and against Judaism and Christianity. Some of these feminists are academically trained religious scholars who teach in religious studies or women's studies in colleges and universities and others are more self-trained writers that relate to the popular feminist spirituality movement, such as Starhawk (The Spiral Dance, Harper, 1979) and Z. Budapest (The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Susan B. Anthony Coven No. I, 1979).This latter group draw their sources from anthropology and historical scholarship of matriarchal societies and ancient religions centered in the worship of the Mother Goddess rather than the patriarchal God of Semitic religions. They see the worship of the Mother Goddess as a woman's religion stemming from pre-patriarchal or matriarchal societies. This religion is believed to have been suppressed by militant patriarchal religions, but survived underground in secret, women-centered, nature religions persecuted by the dominant male religion. Medieval witchcraft is believed to have been such a female religion. Modern feminist witchcraft or “Wicca” sees itself as the heir to this persecuted goddess religion.Writers of this emergent goddess religion draw from an anthropological scholarship of matriarchal origins that developed in the nineteenth century and which many scholars today regard as outdated and historically dubious. There has not yet been an opportunity for an adequate dialogue between these counter-cultural religious feminists and academic feminist scholarship. This is doubly difficult since goddess religion is not simply a matter of correct or incorrect scholarship, but of a rival faith stance. Most goddess religionists would feel that even if an adequate historical precedent for their faith cannot be found in the past, it should be created and they are creating it now.The question of the relation of Jewish and Christian to post–Christian feminist religion will be discussed again later in this paper. For the moment, I will discuss some aspects of the search for an alternative tradition within Judaism and Christianity and its incorporation into theological education in seminaries and religious studies departments.There now exists a fair body of well-documented studies in alternative traditions within Scripture and Jewish and Christian history. These studies show that male exclusion of women from leadership roles and theological reflection is not the whole story. There is much ambiguity and plurality in the traditions about women and the roles women have actually managed to play. For example, evidence is growing that women in first-century Judaism were not uniformly excluded from study in the synagogues. The rabbinic dicta against teaching women Torah thus begins to appear, not as a consensus of that period, but as one side of an argument—that eventually won—against the beginnings of inclusion of women in discipleship.Similarly the teachings of I Timothy about women keeping silence appear, not as the uniform position of the New Testament Church, but as a second generation reaction against wide-spread participation of women in leadership, teaching and ministering in first-generation Christianity. Indeed the very fact that such vehement commandments against women learning and teaching were found in the traditions should have been a clue to the existence of widespread practices to the contrary. Otherwise, the statements would have been unnecessary. But because the documents were used as Scripture or normative tradition, rather than historical documents, this was not realized.The participation of women in early Christianity was not simply an accident of sociology, but a conscious expression of an alternative anthropology and soteriology. The equality of men and women in the image of God was seen as restored in Christ. The gifts of the prophetic spirit, poured out again at the Messianic coming, were understood, in fulfillment of the Messianic prediction of the prophet Joel, to have been given to the “maid-servants” as well as the “menservants” of the Lord (Acts 2, 17–21). Baptism overcomes the sinful divisions among people and makes us one in the Christ: Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free (Galatians 3, 28). Thus, the inclusion of women expressed an alternative theology in direct confrontation with the theology of patriarchal subordination of women. The New Testament now must be read, not as a consensus about women's place, but rather as a conflict and struggle over two alternative understandings of the gospel that suggested different views of male and female.This alternative theology of equality, of women as equal in the image of God, as restored to equality in Christ and as commissioned to preach and minister by the Spirit, did not just disappear with the reassertion of patriarchal norms in I Timothy. It can be traced as surfacing again and again in different periods of Christian history. The strong role played by women in ascetic and monastic life in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages reflects a definite appropriation by women of a theology of equality in Christ that was understood as being applicable particularly to the monastic life. Celibacy was seen as abolishing sex-role differences and restoring men and women to their original equivalence in the image of God. As the male Church deserted this theology, female monastics continued to cling to it and understood their own vocation out of this theology. The history of female monasticism in the late Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation is one of a gradual success of the male Church in suppressing this latent feminism of women's communities. It is perhaps then not accidental that women in renewed female religious orders in Roman Catholicism today have become militant feminists, to the consternation of the male hierarchy.Left-wing Puritanism in the English Civil War again becomes a period when the latent egalitarianism of Christian theology surfaces to vindicate women's right to personal inspiration, community power and public teaching. The reclericalization of the Puritan congregation can be seen as a defeat for this renewed feminism of the Reformation. The Quakers were the one Civil War sect that retained the vision of women's equality and carried it down into the beginnings of nineteenth-century feminism.Finally, the nineteenth century becomes a veritable hotbed of new types of female participation in religion, ranging from the evangelical holiness preacher, Phoebe Palmer, to Mother Ann Lee, understood by her followers as the female Messiah. New theologies that attempt to vindicate androgyny in humanity and God express a sense of the inadequacy of the masculinist tradition of symbolization. Works such as Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (Simon and Schuster, 1979), and Women in American Religion, Janet Wilson James (University of Pennsylvania, 1980), or the documentary history, Women and Religion: The Nineteenth Century, Rosemary Keller and Rosemary Ruether (Harper and Row, 1981), trace different periods of women's recovered history in religion.Feminists who are engaged in recovering alternative histories for women in religion recognize that they are not just supplementing the present male tradition. They are, implicitly, attempting to construct a new norm for the interpretation of the tradition. The male justification of women's subordination in Scripture and tradition is no longer regarded as normative for the gospel. Rather, it is judged as a failure to apply the authentic norms of equality in creation and redemption authentically. This is judged as a failure, in much the same way as the political corruption of the Church, the persecution of Jews, heretics or witches, or the acceptance of slavery has been judged as a failure. This does not mean that this “bad” history is suppressed or forgotten. This also would be an ideological history that tries to “save” the moral and doctrinal reputation of the Church by forgetting what we no longer like. We need to remember this history, but as examples of our fallibility, not as norms of truth.The equality of women, as one of the touchstones for understanding our faithfulness to the vision, is now set forth as one of the norms for criticizing the tradition and discovering its best expressions. This will create a radical reappraisal of Jewish or Christian traditions, since much that has been regarded as marginal, and even heretical, must now be seen as efforts to hold on to an authentic tradition of women's equality. Much of the tradition which has been regarded as “mainstream” must be seen as deficient in this regard. We underestimate the radical intent of women's studies in religion if we do not recognize that it aims at nothing less than this kind of radical reconstruction of the normative tradition.Obviously women cannot affect an educational system until they first secure their own access to it. It has taken approximately one hundred and twenty-five years for most schools of theological education to open their doors to women and then to include women in sufficient numbers for their concerns to begin to be recognized. Women began to enter theological schools of the Congregational tradition beginning with Oberlin in the 1840s and Methodist institutions in the 1870s. Only in the 1970s have some Roman Catholic and Jewish seminaries been open to women. Moreover, even liberal Protestant institutions did not experience any “critical mass” of female students until the 1970s.Usually, access to theological education precedes winning the right to ordination. Winning the educational credentials for ordination then becomes a powerful wedge to winning the right of ordination itself. It is for that reason that there may be efforts to close Roman Catholic seminaries, at least those directly related to Rome, to women. Rumor has it (as of this writing) that a decree has been written but not yet promulgated in Rome forbidding women to attend pontificatical seminaries (which would include all Jesuit seminaries, but not most diocesan and order seminaries). Women's tenure in professional schools of theology cannot be regarded as secure until they win the right to ordination. Only then can they develop a larger number of women students and attain the moral and organizational clout to begin to make demands for changes in the context of the curriculum.Generally, demands for feminist studies begin with the organization of a caucus of women theological students. They then begin to demand women's studies in the curriculum and women faculty who can teach such courses. In many seminaries, particularly in U.S. liberal Protestant institutions, there has been some response to these demands: some women faculty have been hired, and some women's studies incorporated into the curriculum. It is at this point that we can recognize several stages of resistance to the implied challenge to the tradition.One standard strategy of male faculty is to seek and retain one or two women on the faculty, but to give preference to women who are “traditional scholars,” not feminists. This is fairly easy to do by the established rules of the guild, while, at the same time, appearing to be “objective.” Feminist studies are non-traditional. They force one to use non-traditional methods and sources and to be something of a generalist. Their content is still in flux and experimentation. Rare is the person who can fulfill the expectations of both traditional scholarship and feminist scholarship equally well. So it is easy to attack such persons as “unscholarly,” and to fail to tenure them in preference to those women who prefer to be “one of the boys.” As of this writing there is an alarming erosion of feminist faculty talent in theological education through precisely this method. This has forced feminist scholars in theological education to band together in a new national organization, Feminist Theology and Ministry, in order to defend the employment of feminists in existing institutions of theological education.Efforts are also underway to create new, alternative settings for women's studies in religion. For example, groups in the Boston-Washington corridor and in Chicago (largely, but not exclusively, Roman Catholic) are seriously considering the development of autonomous feminist theology schools for women, since the existing (especially Roman Catholic) institutions have proved so unfavorable to their interests.In some other settings a decade-long struggle for women's studies in religion is beginning to bear fruit. For example, at the Harvard Divinity School, bastion of “traditional” education, a pilot program of graduate assistants in women's studies in various fields has continued for some eight years, for much of this time under constant threat of liquidation. However, a study of the program located one of its chief flaws in the lack of prestige and respect given to the women's studies teachers by the tenured faculty. As a result, a new level of funding has been developed to allow this program to be continued and eventually to be converted into a permanent research center for women in religion, with five full-time junior and senior faculty appointments. It remains to be seen whether this expanded “prestige” will not result in some of the same pressure to prefer traditional over feminist scholars.In the development of feminist studies in the curriculum, most institutions move through several stages. The first stage is a grudging allowance of a generalist course on women's studies in religion that is taught outside the structure of the curriculum and usually by a person marginal to the faculty. The male faculty tend to feel little respect for the content of the course (about which they generally know nothing) or its instructor, and no commitment to its continuance as a regular part of the curriculum.The second stage is when faculty begin to acquire women in one or more regular fields who are both respected as scholars and prepared to do women's studies. Women's studies courses can then be initiated that are located in the various regular disciplines of the curriculum, such as Biblical studies, Church history, theology, ethics, pastoral psychology, preaching and liturgy or Church administration. These courses, however, are taught as occasional electives. They attract only feminist students, mostly females and a few males. The rest of the student body is not influenced by them. Most of the faculty ignore them. The new material in them does not affect the foundational curriculum. In other words, women's studies in religion goes on as a marginal and duplicate curriculum. There is now a course in “systematic theology” and a second one on “feminist” theology. The foundational courses continue as before. Therefore, implicitly, they claim the patriarchal bias in theology as the “real” or “true” theology.The third stage would come when feminist studies begin to affect the foundational curriculum itself. Here we might detect two more stages. The third stage would be when foundational curricula continue as usual, except for an occasional “ladies' day” when women's concerns are discussed. Thus, for example, one would teach twelve weeks of traditional male Church history, and then one week in which “great women” are considered. The fourth and optimum situation would be reached when feminist critique really penetrates the whole foundational curriculum and transforms the way in which all the topics are considered. Thus, it becomes impossible to deal with any topic of theological studies without being aware of sexist and nonsexist options in the tradition and bringing that out as an integral part of one's hermeneutic. Thus, for example, one would understand St. Paul as a man whose theology is caught up in ambivalent struggle between various alternatives: between an exclusivist and a universal faith, between an historical and an eschatological faith, and between a patriarchal and an integrative faith. The way he handled the third ambiguity, moreover, conditioned fundamentally the way he handled the first two ambiguities. Thus, one cannot understand Paul as a whole without incorporating the question of sexism into the context of his theology.Generally we can say that most seminaries who have dealt with women's studies at all are somewhere between stage one and stage two, usually at stage one. A few have done an occasional “ladies' day” in the foundational curriculum. Few have even begun to imagine what it would mean to reach the optimum incorporation of feminism into the foundational curriculum, as a normal and normative part of the interpretive context of the whole. Moreover women's studies in religion has not yet matured to the point where it is able to offer a comprehensive reconstruction of methodology and tradition in various fields. For example, a genuine feminist reconstruction of systematic theology is yet to be written.Even further down the road is the “retraining” of male faculty who are able to take such work into account. There are exceptions. Occasionally one finds that prodigy, a male professor who early recognized the value of the feminist critique and has been able, easily and gracefully, to incorporate it into his teaching with a minimum of defensiveness or breast-beating. In general, however, one would have to say that women's studies in theological education is still marginal and vulnerable. The conservative drift of the seminaries means that increasing numbers of women students themselves are non- or anti-feminist. Cadres of explicitly hostile white male students are emerging. Constant struggle is necessary to maintain momentum or even to prevent slipback. The recent publication of the book Your Daughters Shall Prophecy (Pilgrim Press, 1980), reflects on this ten-year struggle for feminist theological education in several major educational settings.Finally, we must say that feminists in religion are by no means united in what they understand to be the optimum feminist reconstruction of religion. We also have to reckon with the fact that religion is not simply an academic discipline. It is an integral part of popular culture. Concern with it has to do with modus vivendi of large numbers of people in many walks of life. It shapes mass institutions, the Church and the Synagogue, as well as alternative religious communities that emerge to fill people's need for life symbols. Thus, the interest in feminism and religion has an urgency, as well as a rancor, that is different from that in academic disciplines.There are several different lines that are emerging both in academics and across the religious institutions and movements of popular culture today. One group, who could be identified as evangelical feminists, believe that the message of Scripture is fundamentally egalitarian. Scripture, especially the New Testament, proposes a new ideal of “mutual submission” of men and women to each other. This has been misread as the subjugation of women by the theological tradition. These feminists would hope to clean up the sexism of Scripture by better exegesis. It would be incorrect to interpret these evangelical feminists as always limited by a pre-critical method of scriptural interpretation. Their limitations are often more pastoral than personal. They are concerned to address a certain constituency, the members of the evangelical churches from which they come, with the legitimacy of an egalitarian understanding of Biblical faith. They sometimes limit themselves to this kind of exegesis because they know it is the only way to reach that constituency.A second view, which I would call the “liberationist” position, takes a more critical view of Scripture. People with this view believe there is a conflict between the prophetic, iconoclastic message of the prophetic tradition, with its attack on oppressive and self-serving religion, and the failure to apply this message to subjugated minorities in the patriarchal family, especially the women and slaves. The vision of redemption of the Biblical tradition transcends the inadequacies of past consciousness. It goes ahead of us, pointing toward a new and yet unrealized future of liberation whose dimensions are continually expanding as we become more sensitive to injustices which were overlooked in past cultures. Liberationists would use the prophetic tradition as the norm to critique the sexism of the religious tradition. Biblical sexism is not denied, but it loses its authority. It must be denounced as a failure to measure up to the full vision of human liberation of the prophetic and gospel messages.A third group, we mentioned earlier, feel that women waste their time salvaging positive elements of these religious traditions. They take the spokesmen of patriarchal religion at their word when they say that Christ and God are literally and essentially male, and conclude that these religions have existed for no other purpose except to sanctify male domination. Women should quit the Church and the Synagogue and move to the feminist coven to celebrate the sacrality of women through recovery of the religion of the Goddess.Although I myself am most sympathetic to the second view, I would regard all these positions as having elements of truth. All respond to real needs of different constituencies of women (and some men). It is unlikely that any of these views will predominate, but all will work as parallel trends in the ensuing decades to reshape the face of religion.The evangelical feminists address themselves to an important group in American religion who frequently use Scripture to reinforce traditional patriarchal family models. Evangelical feminists wish to lift up neglected traditions and to give Biblicist Christians a basis for addressing the question of equality. They will probably get the liberal wing of these churches to modify their language and exegesis. The first creation story of women's and man's equal creation in the image of God will be stressed, rather than the second creation story of Eve from Adam's rib. Galatians 3, 28 will be stressed in Paul rather than Ephesians 5, and so forth. They might get some denominations to use inclusive language for the community and maybe even for God.The liberationist wing would want Churches to take a much more active and prophetic role in critiquing the sexism of society, not only on such issues as abortion rights, gay rights and the ERA, but also on the links between sexism and economic injustice. They would press churches with a social gospel tradition into new questions about the adequacy of a patriarchal, capitalist, and consumerist economy to promote a viable human future.The impact of the separatist goddess religions is more difficult to predict. Traditional Jews and Christians would view these movements as “paganism,” if not “satanism.” The Goddess movements are likely to respond in an equally defensive way and to direct their feelings against feminists who are still working within Churches and Synagogues. A lot depends on whether some mediating ground can be developed. On the one side, there would have to be a conscious rejection of the religious exclusivism of the Jewish and Christian traditions and a recognition of the appropriateness of experiencing the divine through female symbols and body images. The Goddess worshippers, in turn, might have to grow out of some of their defensiveness toward their Jewish and Christian sisters and start thinking about how we are to create a more comprehensive faith for our sons, as well as our daughters.This is not to be construed as a call for such feminists to become (or return) to Judaism or Christianity, but rather a growth toward that kind of maturity that can recognize the legitimacy of religious quests in several kinds of contexts. As long as “goddess” feminists can only affirm their way by a reversed exclusivism and denial of the possibility of liberating elements in the Biblical tradition, they are still tied to the same exclusivist patterns of thought in an opposite form.A creative dialogue between these two views could be very significant. Counter-cultural feminist spirituality could make important contributions to the enlargement of our religious symbols and experiences. We might be able to experience God gestating the world in Her womb, rather than just “making it” through a divine phallic fiat. We would rediscover the rhythms that tie us biologically with earth, fire, air and water which have been so neglected in our anti-natural spiritualities. We would explore the sacralities of the repressed parts of our psyches and our environmental experiences. Many worlds that have been negated by patriarchal religion might be reclaimed for the enlargement of our common life.It is not clear what all this might mean. It might well be the beginning of a new religion as momentous in its break with the past as Christianity was with the religions of the Semites and the Greeks. But if it is truly to enlarge our present options, it must also integrate the best of the insights that we have developed through Judaism and Christianity, as these religions integrated some (not all) of the best insights of the Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds. What is clear is this: the patriarchal repression of women and women's experience has been so massive and prevalent that to begin to take women seriously will involve a profound and radical transformation of our religions.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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