Christ and feminist theology

No religious founder respected women more than Christ and today, more than ever before, women are playing a most vital role in the Church, even in the sphere of theology, previously the exclusive domain of the male. Christ's question 'Who do you say 1 am?' is examined with yet another view point when answered from the faith experience of believing women.

In the early Church certain Catholic theologians wrote with an anti-feminist bias which the Church today wants to forget! In the world at large, women are still poorly treated. According to UN statistics, while forming one half of the world's population, women do three quarters of the world's work, receive one tenth of the world's salary, and own one hundredth of the world's land. More than three quarters of starving people are women and their dependant children. Women are often sexually exploited and raped. Sexism is pervasive throughout the world. All this is totally at variance with Christ's universal love and companionship.

Christ and women? Christ was a male being - that is beyond question, but the problem arises when his maleness is elevated into a universal principle and such reasoning can contribute to a subordination of women. Sometimes it is assumed that the male elements of Christ reveal the maleness of God. Did not Christ call God 'Father'? However, since God is Spirit neither male nor female but Creator of both in God's own image, the maleness of Christ however, has been interpreted as indicating the exclusive maleness of God.

Even the gender of Jesus has been taken to be the paradigm of what it means to be human and this can be interpreted to mean that the human male is closer to the human ideal than is the human female. Theologically, it would be hard to deny that at the Incarnation God could have become a woman. But taking for granted a long tradition of inferiority of women - totally unfounded in Scripture - some Christian theology has tended to elevate maleness as the only genuine way of being human and so Christ has become the male revealer of a male God.

Christ's referral to God as 'Abba' must be carefully interpreted because 'Abba' is the total opposite of a dominating father but rather the term indicates a compassionate, loving, intimate Father who creates a human community of mutuality and understanding. Far from being the powerful patriarch, 'Abba' creates a community of brothers and sisters. That is precisely what Christ tried to do - for was he not, as St Paul reminds us, 'the image of the invisible God'? One female theologian commented that the problem is not that Christ was a male - but that more males were not like him!

Finally, feminist liberation theology of Christ has highlighted Christ as a rather revolutionary 'Liberator'. not only in a generic sense with regard to the poor but in a very special way with regard to women.


 

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