by
Linda Woodhead,
Department of Religious Studies
Lancaster University
Introduction: Our Contemporary Concern with Identity
The term ‘identity’ has become such a staple of contemporary academic
discourse that we hardly pause to think about it. Yet in its contemporary
usage is relatively recent, and points us towards some characteristic modern
concerns.
In order to see this, let me call as a witness St Augustine and his
Confessions. Many of us today would understand this great work as the
narrative of one man’s search for identity. Just a century or two before,
people would have been more likely to view it as an account of Augustine’s
quest for truth, or his quest for God. Augustine himself understood the
Confessions in yet another way: as an account of God’s quest for his soul.
I make these comments in order to illustrate how that habit of thought which
understands human life to be dominated by the quest for identity is
relatively recent. To think in such a way — however illuminating it may be
— is to show one’s allegiance to a conceptuality quite different from the
Christian-Platonic one which shaped Augustine and which continued to shape
the Western world until the dawning of the modern age.
What does the increasing dominance of discourses of identity reveal about
the contemporary culture which has submerged an older Christian-Platonic (or
even an Enlightenment) framework? One thing it reveals is that our culture
no longer assesses our stances, beliefs and loyalties primarily in terms of
their coherence or correspondence with wider norms, but in terms of what
they reveal about the self
The self is another characteristically modern notion. Its use in a
substantive sense dates only from the late seventeenth century.1 It signals
a shift from a view of the human person from a third person perspective
(caught by the gaze of God or of another human person) to a view of the
person which privileges the first person perspective and does not objectify
the subject to the same degree. Whereas the language about the ‘human
creature’, ‘human person’, ‘human being’, or ‘Man’ tended to specify the
subject in terms of its relationship with other things (the Creator, other
human beings, the rest of the created order), language about the ‘self tends
to see other things in terms of their relationship with the subject.
Identity-talk is inseparably bound up with self-talk. For a conceptuality
shaped by these terms a person’s decision, for example, to join a particular
religious community will be explained not in terms of their belief that they
will thereby be enabled to enter into truer relationship with God and fellow
Christians, but in terms of what they wish to say about themselves. This way
of viewing things inevitably feeds back into the way we live; we make our
‘life-style choices’ with at least an eye on what they will say about the
sort of person we are.
In the attempt to explain this shift towards a concern with self-identity
many sociological and cultural commentators tend to speak in terms of the
fragmentation and fragility (or destabilisation and decentering) of the
modern self. They suggest that many of the changes which define modernity
lead directly to the shaking and undermining of stable human identity.
Social differentiation and the division of labour, the speeding up of time,
cultural pluralism, de-traditionalization — all these characteristics of
the modern (or post-modern) condition are said to lead to the increasing
fragility and fragmentation of the self. 2
It seems then that our increased concern with ‘self and with ‘self-identity’
can be attributed at least in part to the destabilisation and decentering of
the self in modern times. As our identities become less fixed and given, so
our anxiety about identity increases. As we have become more and more cut
loose from stable cornmunities, occupations, social and gender roles, it
becomes harder both for me to know who I am, and for others to know who I
am. I meet you not as the daughter of Paul the butcher and wife of Bill the
ploughman who lives in the house on the comer, but as a cipher whose
identity hangs in the air. Similarly I meet myself as the crossroads of a
host of conflicting and unstable multiple identities, many of them validated
and recognised by no-one but myself I may not know who my father is; my
family may be from a country and culture other than the one in which I now
live; I may have been formed by no religious community but given a
‘multi-cultural’ education instead; and none of the people around me may
recognise me.
So whilst my need to be recognised, known, accepted, rooted, and placed is
perhaps no greater than that of previous generations, it may be less easily
met. And it is this loss of identity gives rise to our contemporary concern
with identity (as well, perhaps as our nostalgic longing for ‘community’).
As Christopher Lasch argued so powerfully in _The Culture of Narcissism_,
the modern (American) condition is narcissistic, and a narcissus is not one
who has a strong or even egotistical sense of self, but one who lacks a
strong sense of self and is therefore trapped in self-referential behaviour
in the desperate quest to find out who they really are.3 The huge number of
contemporary courses, books, and products which promise to unlock the secret
of my ‘real self all bear out Lasch’s thesis.
_Feminist Theology and the Quest for Identity_
My main purpose in this paper is to relate this discussion of identity and
identity-loss to feminism and, more particularly, to feminist theology. By
this means I hope to open up a fresh and potentially revealing perspective
on feminist theology, and perhaps to take forward some debates within and
about feminist theology.
My argument is that some aspects of feminist theology can be viewed as a
manifestation of our anxiety about identity, and that the very strong stress
on the essential difference of women and of women’s experience which
characterises much feminist theology can be viewed in part as a strategy to
resolve contemporary anxieties about identity. In the final part of the
paper I shall argue that this is in many ways a misguided strategy, and I
will try to show why that is, and to propose what I believe to be better
feminist — and Christian — alternatives.
_i. Gender as primary identity_
All feminist theology is, of course, not the same.4 But one of the more
common features of feminist theology is an insistence that _gender identity
is primary identity_. Many feminist theologians agree this whether they are
Christian or post-Christian, liberal or radical, and whether they believe
that gender is naturally given or socially constructed. In order to see just
how central the assertion of gender primacy is in feminist theology there is
no better place to start than with the claims which the discipline makes for
itself For in many cases, feminist theology does not present itself as one
school amongst others within the wider discipline of theology — as a
parallel, say, to Thomistic theology or liberal theology. Rather, it
understands itself as more radical than that, as an entirely new departure,
an entirely new way of doing theology which calls into question the methods
and self-understanding of all traditional (male) theology. Rosemary Radford
Ruether, for example, presents feminist theology as a whole new way of doing
theology because it is based upon _women’s experience_. As she says,
The uniqueness of feminist theology lies not in its use of the
criterion of experience but rather in its use of _women’s_
experience, which has been almost entirely shut out of theological
reflection in the past. 5
The claim made in passages like this is that one’s gender determines one’s
experience and so one’s knowledge, including one’s knowledge of God. So
gender identity has a primacy, a primacy which determines even ones knowing.
In its weaker forms the claim is that our experience of God is always
determined by the subject who experiences, the most salient characteristic
of that subject being his or her gender. In its stronger forms, the claim is
that the divine is actually _constructed_ according to gender. Many feminist
theologians agree with this strong claim where the traditional Christian God
is concerned, viewing Him as a male construct serving patriarchal interests.
Not all feminist theologians are willing to take a step further and suggest
that women construct their own God, but some get fairly close to this
position by maintaining that God must conform to women’s interests. As
Rosemary Ruether famously puts it in _Sexism and God-Talk_,
Theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full
humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an
authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature
of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or
a community of redemption.6
This position can easily slide into the more radical one which acknowledges
that women are free to construct the divine in the way they find most
helpful. Post-Christian feminist theologians who have embraced goddess
worship have been the most ready to admit this. As Carol Christ says,
Women, who have been deprived of a female religious symbol system
for centuries, are in an excellent position to recognize the power
and primacy of symbols. I believe women must develop a theory of
symbol and thealogy congruent with their experience at the same time
as they “remember and invent” new symbol systems.7
Thus in _some_ feminist theology, God Himself/Herself comes to be
subordinated to gender identity. The assumption is that women’s experience
is competent to judge and construe both revelation and God. Women’s
experience becomes the primary knowledge which trumps even what has been
previously understood as God’s communication of Himself/Herself In this way,
I want to suggest, women come to swap places with the Godhead. Whereas in
traditional Christian thought God was believed to create humankind, now it
is humankind who creates God. No longer are we made in God’s image, but He
or She is made in ours. In this way, the self comes to occupy centre stage
in some feminist theology as in so much modern thought. Here the modern
preoccupation with self-identity works itself out in terms of
gender-identity. It is _woman_ who makes God. She becomes the measure of all
things.
_ii. Problems with the elevation of gender-identity_
The claim made by some feminist theology that gender-identity constitutes
primary identity and determines the whole religious and theological
enterprise has clearly won many supporters. And in the forms in which it is
so forcefully stated by some feminist theologians, it does at first sight
seem to have some plausibility and an immediate attractiveness (I will say
more about this attractiveness below). On closer examination, however, I
believe that feminist theology’s assertion of the primacy of gender-identity
is in fact beset by a number of serious problems.
One cluster of problems concerns the very notion of women’s identity and
women’s experience. In the sorts of feminist theology I have cited above
these notions are absolutely central, and the claim that feminist theology
is unique is built upon belief that there is such a thing as a clear and
distinct female identity and experience. But in practice these notions prove
elusive. Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow divide women’s experience into two
categories: ‘women’s _traditional_ experience’ which includes ‘marriage and
motherhood’, ‘intuition, expression of feeling, ‘women’s body experiences
such as menstruation, pregnancy’; and ‘women’s _feminist_ experience, which
includes ‘the experience of liberation itself — recognising oppression,
confronting sexist culture and institutions, and moving into freedom’.8 This
way of specifying what constitutes women’s experience and women’s identity
in terms of the experience of liberation and oppression on the one hand and
bodily experiences on the other seems a fair summary of the approach adopted
by a majority of feminist theologians, and a number of more recent works
identify women’s experience in nearly identical terms.9
More recently there has been yet another development in feminist theological
thought about women’s experience, namely an increased stress upon women’s
experience of nurturing, connectedness, relationality and sisterhood. Mary
Daly was one of the first to speak about women’s orientation towards
sisterhood.10 Her comments seemed to win empirical backing from Carol
Gilligan’s _In a Different Voice_ (1982), a work much cited in subsequent
feminist theology. Since then, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s work has also
displayed an increasing stress upon this aspect of women’s experience, and
one finds similar ideas in the work of Isabel Carter Heyward, Rebecca Chopp,
Mary Grey, Anne Johnson, and in many of those feminist theologians
influenced by ecofeminism. Indeed it is a measure of the increased
popularity of the construal of women’s experience in terms of relationality
and connectedness that in her recent book _Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s
Prophet _(1994), Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza feels the need to attack it
for its lack of political awareness, and to reassert the primacy of women’s
experience of opression and liberation over against that of relationality.
11
A final construal of women’s experience — and so of women’s identity- -
which has long been influential in feminist theology is one which speaks of
women’s experience as linking women directly with the divine. Very often the
suggestion is made in feminist theology that authentic women’s experience is
transparent to the divine or participatory in the divine. This goes hand in
hand with the suggestion that women are naturally spiritual and naturally
connected with the divine. As the South African feminist theologian Felicity
Edwards expresses it,
spiritual experience… is moving evolutionarily beyond masculinist
consciousness, which is mental, conceptual consciousness _par
excellence_, to the level of spirit. Spirit is beyond or above or
deeper than the ego developed in the separatizing masculinist
mode… neo-feminist consciousness, epitomized in this luminous,
radiant aliveness, the perception that ‘I am I insofar as I am in
you’ has all the incisive clarity of masculine consciousness, along
with the holistic consciousness of the feminine. This identifies it
as a definite advance in the evolution of consciousness, and to live
this way is to love. 12
As Edwards’ comments show, this understanding of women’s experience is one
which ties in neatly with an emphasis upon women’s naturally relational,
nurturing and ‘holisitic’ qualities, and which often goes hand-in-hand with
the latter. 13
Here then are four of feminist theology’s most characteristic attempts to
specify what women’s experience is: experience of motherhood, menstruation
and other things related to women’s bodies; experience of oppression;
experience of connectedness; and experience of Spirit. As I have explained
at greater length in an article in _Modern Theology_ I am seriously
suspicious of all these attempts to give content to women’s experience –
and indeed to the very _notion_ of women’s experience. 14 To me, each one of
these attempts to specify what women’s experience actually amounts to seems
beset by difficulties. Take the claim that women’s experience is constituted
by the experiences of oppression and of resistance to oppression. For a
start, not all women would agree that oppression has been such a defining
feature of their lives. And even if they did, there seems to be something
highly problematic about the strategy of building women’s sense of selfhood
upon victimisation. To do so is to suggest that women have a vested interest
in maintaining oppression and that without it their identity — not to
mention their ability to do theology — will collapse. What if the opposite
pole is stressed: not victimhood but struggle against oppression and
liberation from oppression? To see self-identity in these terms is certainly
one option open to women, but the model of woman as liberator, far from
saying anything distinctive about woman’s identity, seems merely to buy into
a long-established male paradigm: man as freedom-fighter, deliverer of
oppressed peoples, the political or martial hero, the fighter for rights.
In some ways I believe that the claim that the distinctiveness of women’s
identity is based on experience of connectedness and relationality is
therefore more promising than its alternatives. At least it has no vested
interest in victimhood. In addition, there is some (limited) experimental
evidence for the claim — Gilligan’s study, for example, and it receives
additional support from some everyday observations. 15 Moreover, there seems
to be an obvious plausibility about the claim that women’s role as mothers
and child-rearers should affect the way in which they relate more generally,
and might influence them differently from men. But not all women are
mothers, and, increasingly, not all mothers are child-rearers. Equally, many
women resist the self-image of themselves as nurturing and relational and
see it as an attempt to restrict their identity. And as women increasingly
enter into public life it is clear that some can be just as ruthless,
independent and self-determining as men.
An additional problem with the claim that women’s experience is essentially
one of relation and that women are naturally in tune with one another and
with the divine, is that it can easily begin to sound like something an
evangelical cleric might have said in the last century in order to maintain
women in their role as ‘angel of the house’. Here is William Wilberforce on
the subject:
That sex… by the very constituency of its nature, is more
favourably disposed to the feelings and offices of religion. 16
His frend Hannah More adds,
Their hearts are naturally soft and flexible, open to the
impressions of love and gratitude, their feelings are tender and
lively; all these are favourable to the cultivation of a devotional
spirit. 17
In other contexts, feminist theologians are rightly keen to protest against
such ‘stereotyping’ and ‘essentialism’; it is strange therefore to endorse
such views in the course of trying to specify the nature of women’s
experience and identity.
Feminist theologians’ attempts to give content to the notion of women’s
experience and women’s identity are therefore fraught with difficulty. The
attempt is, I think, admirable in its recognition that there are real
differences between men and women, and that these differences can and should
affect the way we organise our thought, our lives, our society. And yet the
way in which these differences are explained by feminist theology, and the
way in which they are thought to account for women’s identity in its
entirety seems to me problematic.
On these issues I believe that an engagement with the thought of the
Belgian-born feminist Luce Irigaray can be illuminating. ” Following
Irigaray, I would want to affirm the importance of women’s sexed
differences, but recognise that these are not such that universal
declarations can be made about them. They are differences which are bound up
with our shifting cultures and discourse, which are affected by women’s
different locations, and which are not simply the product of a given and
fixed women’s ‘nature’. Like Irigaray I would want to affirm that our sexed
differences should not be simply suppressed by the invocation of universal
‘human’ nature, for the latter can indeed turn out to be a cover for
predominantly male (or other dominant) interests. But that does not mean
that women need claim an identity entirely different from that of men, nor
that this identity can be clearly and universally specified.
In its attempt to give clear and universal content to women’s identity and
experience then, I believe that the direction taken by much feminist
theology should be resisted, and that there are good _feminist_ grounds for
this resistance. In denying the complex, shifting and multi-faceted nature
of women’s identities I believe that feminist theology is guilty of being
reductionist. It seeks to reduce my identity as a woman to less than it
really is. It tries to foreclose prematurely on my richness and variety and
contradictoriness and possibilities. One can often see the same process at
work in secular feminism. Reading a feminist collection on _Heterosexuality_,
for example, I was interested to see that most of the contributors
acknowledged that this was a topic which feminist theory had hitherto
excluded from its agenda. Heterosexuality and heterosexual relatedness had
therefore become an invisible aspect of women’s lives. Consequently, the
contributors to this volume struggled to speak about the topic. They felt
guilty in acknowledging the importance of their relationships with men and
the centrality of this important aspect of their identity. As one commented,
‘having a good husband seems to be many feminists’ well-guarded secret’. 19
Feminist theology is often equally guilty of such reductionism. Those
aspects of my identity which are affirmed as ‘authentic’ women’s experience
are acceptable, enabling me to acknowledge wholeheartedly my sisterly
endeavours, my ecological ones, my nurturing ones, my spiritual ones. But
those aspects of my identity which have been labelled inauthentic — or
simply not written or spoken of — become problematic. In _Changing the
Subject_ (1994), Mary McClintock Fulkerson points out how the discourses of
American Pentecostal and Presbyterian women have thus been excluded by
academic feminist theology’s tendency to a hegemonic and reductionist
understanding of ‘authentic women’s experience’. 20 ‘Women’s experience’ has
become a tool of exclusion and a political device. Women who are not like
what a woman is supposed to be like, who believe things that women are not
supposed to believe, or who willingly belong to institutions deemed
oppressive by feminist theology find themselves either having to repress the
‘inauthentic’ parts of their identity, or feeling that they are not proper
women at all.
_iii. The attraction of innocent gender-identity_
Why, given that it faces so many problems, has feminist theology’s
reductionist strategy of identifying a narrowly-defined gender-identity as
primary identity seemed attractive to so many women? One reason is surely
that it provides such a neat solution to our contemporary anxieties about
identity of which I spoke at the start of this paper. Currently these
anxieties are perhaps more acute for women than for men as women enter into
roles, offices and institutions only recently opened to us, and in so doing
leave behind the clearer and more stable roles, duties and identities that
our mothers and grandmothers were more likely to know. How appealing then to
be told not only that one has a clear identity — one’s identity as a woman.
This identity is made secure and attractive in a number of ways:
First, it is presented as a natural, given identity. It demands no training,
effort or exertion to attain, but must simply be ‘owned’ and ‘celebrated’.
It may require 1consciousness raising’ or the banishment of ‘false
consciousness’, but it is there to be discovered rather than achieved.
Second, it is an identity which is wholly my own, inalienable and
autonomous. It is not bestowed by another nor given in relationship, but is
entirely within my control and can never be taken from me.
Third, it is an innocent and a good identity, a state of natural and
original blessedness. Women who get in touch with their true selves find
there all the moral and spiritual resources they need. The self, it is
suggested, is not merely good, but is in deep connection with the divine and
ultimately one with the divine.21
Finally, woman’s identity is often made yet stronger and more stable by
defining it over against the ‘other’ of male identity. Any fragile identity
may be made stronger by this oppositional strategy. Thus Christian
fundamentalism reinforces its identity through opposition to a wider
‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ culture regarded as totally corrupt and enslaved to
evil.22 The blacker the enemy is painted, the sharper the definition in
which the whiter-than-white group appears. Unfortunately, the same process
can sometimes be seen at work in feminist theology. Thus a male viewpoint
(‘androcentric’ or ‘phallocentric’) is seen as a bad thing _in itself_,
whereas a female standpoint is seen as having a natural legitimacy. As with
forms of religious fundamentalism, my innocent identity here depends upon
the ascription of a guilty identity to those who are not me. Some feminists
thus persist in calling men ‘the enemy’, and it is still common to read
remarks like the following: men belong to a social group ‘whose main
relation to women is through rape’.23 Similar ideas play themselves out in
feminist theology in the idea that all theology done by men is deficient and
misleading, whereas all theology which articulates women’s experience is
helpful, authentic and good. Women’s desire to find a secure and good
identity may, it seems, be bought at the price of denying men the same
privilege.
_Christianity and Women’s Identity_
So far I have tried to show that feminist theology relies on a belief in
gender as primary identity which is problematic on its own (feminist) terms.
I’ve been trying to suggest that there are good grounds for women _qua_
women to reject it. In the remaining part of this talk I wish to consider
feminist theology’s insistence upon the primacy of gender identity from a
wider Christian perspective and to suggest that there are equally important
reasons why feminist theologians as _Christians_ should be suspicious of
this whole strategy. I am going to do this by reflecting on a few passages
from scripture and tradition which seem to me particularly pertinent to this
whole discussion of identity. These passages seem to me to have the power to
move our thinking about identity forwards, and to force it beyond some of
the dead-ends it often becomes trapped in contemporary discourse.
_i. ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ (I Cor 4.7)_
In his dispute with the ‘puffed up’ Corinthians, Paul chastises them by
asking: ‘What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it,
why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ As the context of his question
makes clear, Paul is thinking here both of what is given to us by God _and_
by other human beings. For Paul, as for traditional Jewish thought, human
identity is not the creation of each individual, but is bestowed by God and
by fellow-humans. Our existence is gift. It is gift of God and it is the
gift of those who have shaped and formed us, both directly and through the
texts and institutions they put in place.
In this insistence that all we have is gift, Biblical anthropology stands at
odds with much modern thought about the self and self-identity — including
much feminist theological thought. As we have seen, the very language of
‘self’ suggests a self-contained, autonomous subject rather that a subject
formed by relationship with God and others. Feminist theology often
reinforces this picture. It suggests that my identity as a woman is given
and that it is my natural or essential substance. It maintains that all
knowledge must be tested at the bar of an experience which constitutes my
personal, individual criterion of right and wrong, true and false. And it
proposes that women’s goal is liberation, the flinging off of dependence and
all the ties that bind us. Thus the feminist theological hope is often
articulated in terms of autonomy, freedom, independence, self-naming, and
self-creation.
More recently, however, there have been voices within feminist theology
which have begun to question this non-relational understanding of self I
have spoken already of those feminist theologians who wish to speak of
women’s predisposition towards relationality. Equally, Mary McClintock
Fulkerson’s _Changing the Subject_ develops this theme under the influence
of post-structuralism by stressing human _intersubjectivity_: the way in
which every aspect of human existence is socially, culturally and textually
constructed. She criticises feminist theology for relying upon a notion of
women’s experience which is naive about these matters and which imagines
such experience to be a sort of pre-cultural deliverance unique to each
woman.
So there are some signs that, following the lead of secular feminism,
feminist theology may at last be beginning to move away from belief in what
Seyla Benhabib has called the ‘unencumbered’ self, the self viewed as
asocial, acultural, wholly independent, self-determined, self-determining,
self-possessed and autonomous.24 In doing so, feminist theology moves closer
to a Christian understanding of the self, an understanding which asks, ‘what
do you have that you have not received?’ Yet still there remains a crucial
difference between the two understandings: when Paul asks this question he
draws attention not just to what is received from other human beings, but
what is received from God. Of course the two are often inseparable: God
works through human beings and human culture, and particularly through Jesus
Christ. But God is not reducible to the human, and God the Holy Spirit may
also be directly present in His creation.
So in Biblical thought, as in traditional Christian and Jewish thought, to
be human is not merely to be in relation with other human beings, but to be
in relation with God. To be human is not to be a ‘self’ but a _creature_. It
is to stand in relation to God as one’s maker, and to the rest of the
created order as a fellow-creature who has been granted dominion. So Genesis
1-2, for example, paints a picture of what it is to be human which stresses
not only that it is to leave one’s mother and father and cleave to a member
of the opposite sex, but that it is to be made by God in God’s image and
placed by Him in a particular relation to the rest of the created order.
Likewise, Psalm 8 answers the question it sets itself –‘what is a human
creature?’ — by saying that it is a being made by God and placed between
God and other creatures: a little less than God, with dominion over what God
has made. To be human is to be set within a network of relationships both
with God and with fellow creatures, human and non-human. It is this which
makes the person rather than any individual or autonomous substance. The
human being is given by and with God and the rest of the created order.
_ii.’Your life is hid with Christ in God'(Col 3.3)_
Our contemporary anxiety about identity is unlikely to be assuaged by
another theme in Christian thought bearing on identity: that the self is
_hidden_. As Paul puts it in his letter to the Colossians, ‘your life is hid
with Christ in God’.
In the face of anxiety about who we are, our natural response is to seek an
identity which is not hidden but clear, revealed, easy to grasp. It is this,
I have suggested, which underlies feminist theology’s eagerness to seek
identity in gender, an identity which is immediate and apparent, easily
recognised, written in our very flesh. Yet there is much in the Christian
tradition which should make us wary of seizing hold of a graspable identity
in this way. Remarks like the one just cited by Paul remind us of a powerful
tradition within Christianity which stresses that we are always much more
than we can ever know. Our identity in this life remains forever beyond our
grasp. Our life is something which is hid with God, and which — with God’s
help and the help of others — we can never fully know in this life.
Reflection upon the self in relation to God the Holy Trinity may help flesh
out this idea.
First, as God the Father, God is the God who makes all things, including
each human person. The Biblical assurance is that persons are not made by
God in a moment of absent-mindedness, or in the fashion of identical objects
on a factory conveyor-belt. Rather, each is shaped by a God who loves what
He makes, who intends each creature to be as He makes it, and who gives to
each its particular form. As Psalm 139 says,
thou didst form my inward parts,
thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well;
my frame was not hidden from thee,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately in the depths of the earth.
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;
in thy book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there were none of them…'(Ps 139.13-16)
Compare this with the Lord’s words to the prophet Jeremiah,
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations (Jer 1.5)
So the Biblical picture is of a creator God who consecrates each one of us
as we are, has a task for each one of us, and gives us the talents with
which to fulfil that task. But the task and the talents lie hidden unless
discovered and actualised by each person for him or herself Their hiddenness
safeguards human freedom. We are not programmed like robots to fulfil our
task and grown into the image of God; we may or may not accept our calling
and grow with God’s help into what God has made us.
Second, as God the Son, God is the God through whom all things were made. He
is ‘logos’, the principle by which the whole creation is ordered, the ‘order
and coherence in which it is composed’.21 In the man Jesus Christ this order
is embodied and made clearly visible to human beings. As the Letter to the
Hebrews puts it, ‘in these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom
he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world’
(Heb 1.1). All things exist for Christ. He is their _telos_, that for which
all was created and towards which all tends. The creation is, as Karl Barth
puts it, ‘the external basis of the covenant’.26 The world was created in
order that human beings might exist in covenant relationship with God, and
they exist in such relationship through Christ, the _telos_ of creation
towards which all things move.
Human beings then are made _by_ Christ and made _for_ Christ. The Gospel of
John says of Jesus Christ that he comes ‘unto his own’ (Jn 1. 11). He comes
to a humankind created through him, whose life and conditions of life he has
chosen to share. The Christian belief is that in coming to Christ, human
beings come to their true selves. He is the pattern of true human existence
and abundant human life, and thus He is also depicted in Christian tradition
as the Judge who will reveal who we truly are. But as He reveals the
criteria of judgement in His own being — the Being in which we are offered
incorporation — Christ comes as Saviour as well as Judge. He comes to earth
to bring humans to their true selves. He shows in His words and His deeds
what full humanity means and what a truly human life looks like. And the
‘good news’ is that He is more than just teacher and exemplar; He does not
remain external to us, an exemplary figure from the past, but by His death
and resurrection gives us the gift of His Spirit, and by this gift comes to
exist _in_ us, incorporating the believer into His body, the church.
So third, as God the Holy Spirit, God is immediately present to His
creation. He is not an aloof and distant God, but the God who stands at the
door of each person’s heart and knocks. In the Biblical understanding God is
closer to each person than they are to themselves. He is the basis of our
life, our inspiration, and of all that is authentic about us. The Spirit is
not an ‘optional extra’ in human life, but the only possible ground of a
truly human life. Such a life, in other words, comes from God and not from
‘we ourselves’. The purely human is what Paul calls ‘flesh’, and its nature
is sin. Without God humans are in sin. They are less than they should be,
and less than God intended. But those who open their hearts to God and to
neighbour are promised the gift of the Spirit and new life through the
Spirit. They become a ‘new creation’, a creation which begins in this life,
but which is completed only after this life, in resurrection. In this life
therefore, the new creation remains partially hidden and the full revelation
when God will be ‘all in all’ is still awaited. In the meanwhile we
struggle, partly redeemed, and partly still in thrall to what is not of God.
By thinking through our relation to the Trinitarian God it is thus possible
to see something of what is meant by the statement that our lives are hid
with Christ in God. The source of our life comes ftom outside ourself and
lies in the God who made us, redeemed us and sanctifies us. If we think that
our identity is our own possession, something within our control and within
our comprehension, we deny the true source of our life and become less that
we should be. We are more than we can know or lay hold of. as Paul says,
‘you are not your own’ (I Cor 6.19). Only God knows what we really are, and
this will only be fully revealed to us on the day of judgement.
Yet the insistence that our life is hid _with Christ_ reminds us that it is
not entirely hidden, not absolutely mysterious: we are not left completely
without clues, for God is a God who has revealed Himself, most notably in
Jesus Christ. We have had ‘glimpses’ of our true identity in Christ. Our
lives must therefore be lived in conformity to Christ’s, a conformity made
possible by the gift of His Spirit. The Spirit unites Christians with one
another and with Christ. They become more than they would otherwise be, and
more than they can know. This does _not_ mean that they cease to be the
particular individual God created, a unique and irreplaceable human being.
Nor does it mean that they become clones of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, it
means that their individuality, their unique identity, can only be perfected
in relation to Christ and to one another. _’Your_ life is hid _with_ Christ
in God. It is hid _with_ Christ, not absorbed without remainder into Christ.
It is _your_ life, not someone else’s.
It is at this point that some feminist theology becomes most suspicious of
Christianity, for it views the Christian God not as the One who perfects
humanity, but as the One who threatens to destroy it. Thus Mary Daly and
Daphne Hampson, for example, reject belief in a transcendent personal God
and in Christ as the Son of God, because they believe that to submit to them
is to submit to heteronomy. Both Father and Son threaten the autonomy of the
individual just as much as they threaten women’s gender-identity. I do not
doubt that this critique has bite, to the extent that women’s identities
have sometimes been cruelly constrained within the churches, and that the
tradition has been used to prevent women from becoming what God intended
them to be. I have tried to show, however, that it is a distortion of the
tradition to view God as a wholly transcendent being set over against us.
The Bible offers us again and again a picture of God and His people not in
competition but in the most intimate relationship. We are led to see not
that God endangers human freedom, but that it is _only_ in relation to God
and to other human beings that we can become what we are and achieve true
freedom.
_iii.’Put on the new nature…’ (Eph 4.24)_
As we have seen, some feminist theology offers to women an easily grasped
identity which is innocent and good. Understandably, the offer is
attractive. We all want to believe that we are good, and we would all like
to think that we are more sinned against than sinning. Yet Christianity
warns us against such hopes and desires and sees them as dangerous
temptations. I have spoken above of how Christianity holds before us the
hope of a new life lived in the Spirit, and speaks of our life hid in Christ
as a ‘new creation’. The corollary of this is that what may be called our
‘natural’ lives are neither good nor innocent, but less than they should be,
less than human, less than what God intends. Our ‘natural’ life is a life in
which we try to draw only on our own resources, or on diabolic sources of
energy which transcend the individual. Such natural life stands in direct
opposition to the life which God holds before us, a life energised by the
Spirit. So Paul instructs the Ephesians: ‘Put off your old nature which
belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful
lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new
nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and
holiness.’
Feminist theology has always been critical of Christianity’s emphasis on
human fallibility and sinfulness. Valerie Saiving’s early critique of
Niebuhr’s identification of human sinfulness with pride as an analysis
appropriate to men but not to women has proved extremely influential, and
many feminists since Saiving have argued that if women are tainted by
‘original sin’ it is more likely to be the sin of faltering self-worth than
of pride.27 Women need to develop a more positive image of themselves, not a
more negative one, and insofar as it has instilled the latter, Christianity
has been guilty of crippling many women psychologically and leaving them
unable to live their lives to the full.
There is, I believe, much truth in this critique. The doctrine of original
sin can certainly be used by people made confident by their positions of
power to keep others in their place. Indeed the same illicit use may be made
of this doctrine as may be made of gender identity: it can be used to limit
and restrict a person’s identity, to tell them that they are less than they
actually are. To tell someone that they are completely corrupt and to say no
more is a distortion of the gospel which results in human distortion. It is,
moreover, a distortion with which we are all too ready to co-operate, for
there is that in all of us which already whispers insidiously that we are
not good enough, not the sort of person who can perform heroic tasks, not
worthy to associate with other people or accept their affection, that we are
bound to fail in what we attempt, and that we are likely to corrupt what we
touch.28 But to believe such things is to refuse to believe the gospel: the
good news that human beings are offered new life by and in God. It is to
refuse to believe that our lives are hid with Christ in God, and it is to
succumb to the desire to believe that our identities are entirely within our
possession and knowledge and known to us in their entirety. It is to cling
to the old nature and _refuse_ to put on the new nature.
The attempt to grasp at an innocent gender-identity is thus no antidote to
the distorting effects of a misuse of the doctrine of original sin, for it
is but a mirror image of the same reductionist strategy. Both attempt to
bind and fix human identity in an idolatrous way. Both exalt a part of human
identity at the expense of the wider whole, and so reduce human beings to
less than they really are. Human identity should not to be identified with a
person’s present identity, or with any identity which may be grasped hold of
in its entirety. Any such ‘fixed’ identity must always come under judgement.
Both those who believe they are all good and those who believe they are all
bad are guilty of wanting a control and certainty about themselves which the
gospel will not allow. The gospel tells us that our identity is not our own
in this way, that it is always more then we think, always transcendent,
because caught up with God in Christ by the Spirit.
At its best, the Christian doctrine of sin is one which, like Paul speaking
to the Ephesians, speaks in the same breath of the old life which we must
put away and of the new life which we must put on. It is a distortion to
mention only the old life just as it is a distortion to mention only the
new. Christianity has sometimes been guilty of the former distortion, but
feminist theology is nearly always guilty of the latter. The belief that our
natural identity is innocent and good is dangerous because it stands at such
variance with the evidence, particularly the evidence of the modern age; it
is a denial of the terrifying realities of human sin and evil. It is also
dangerous in the particular form in which it appears in feminist theology
because, as we have seen, women’s innocence is often asserted in the same
breath as men’s guilt. The _hiddenness_ of human identity provides a good
reason for being highly suspicious of any such blanket evaluations of human
worth. ‘Judge not’, Jesus commands, for no-one knows what lies hidden in the
human heart. Human identity and human motivation are not open and accessible
in this life, and judgement is always provisional.
_iv.’A woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural Thus He who established
the two sexes will restore them both’ (Augustine)29_
I have been arguing that Christianity resists reducing identity to gender
identity. It insists that identity is more than we can grasp, and that any
grasping at identity cuts us off from our larger identity, that identity
which is a new creation, hid with God in Christ. Yet it is not part of my
argument to deny the reality and the importance of gender identity, as long
as it is understood within the wider context of our God-given identity.
Indeed I wish to argue that there is much in the Christian tradition which
safeguards sexed identity and insists upon its importance — indeed which
goes further than feminist theology by viewing gender as part of the order
of redemption.
The most quoted piece of scripture in the gender debate must surely be that
from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there
is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female; for you are all one
in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3.28). In the days when feminist theology was very
much under the influence of liberal feminism, this passage was taken to
endorse the typically liberal insistence that there is one basic human
nature shared by all God’s creatures which ensures a perfect equality
between them compared to which all differences including cultural, economic
and sexual differences are relatively trivial. The passage was therefore
interpreted as saying that women should be treated as the equals of men by
the church. Now that liberal feminism is no longer so popular, however, the
passage is sometimes viewed a little less favourably. The suspicion may be
that it is advocating a sexless, spiritualised existence which renders
women’s reality invisible.
In fact, I think that the passage is doing something rather different from
what both the liberal and post-liberal readings suggest. It is not speaking
about some universal human nature which underlies all other differences and
which is more real than those differences; it is speaking about the new life
which is consequent upon incorporation into the body of Christ. It insists
that this life is open to all comers. No-one is excluded on any ground
whatsoever and no-one is any more or less a member than any other, As the
preceding sentence says, ‘For as many of you as were baptised into Christ
have put on Christ’ (Gal.3.27). What this passage speaks of, in other words,
is the new identity offered in Christ, an identity which is offered to all
and which in that sense relativises our ‘old’ identities. It establishes our
identity on a new foundation, it places its centre of gravity in Christ and
fellow members of his body, the church, and it establishes our primary
identity as children of God and heirs of the promise.
As we have seen above, putting on this new identity does indeed mean letting
go of some aspects of our old identity. That in us which is corrupt will be
exposed in the light of God, and should be renounced. But we are not all
corruption, and we are not to be transformed out of recognition. There is
also that in the ‘old nature’ which is ‘natural’ in the sense Augustine
intends in the quotation above: part of what God has created, which must not
be discarded but transformed and perfected. And our sex, according to the
overwhelming (though not entire) weight of Christian tradition, falls into
this category.30 This is why Augustine says, ‘a woman’s sex is not a defect;
it is natural… Thus he who established the two sexes will restore them
both’. This insistence is bound up with another: that the new creation,
brought to completion only in the next age, is a creation in which bodies
are not excluded. For Christianity insists that human beings are an
inseparable unity of body and soul. Christianity goes further than feminist
theology in this insistence, for it suggests that this unity is a God-given
unity and will persist beyond death: the resurrection life is a life of
renewed body as well as mind and soul. The entirety of the human person is
gathered into the order of redemption: we continue as sexed and embodied
persons rather than as the ethereal, sexless, sub-personal manifestations of
Spirit which too much feminist spirituality envisages.31
This does not mean, however, that our sex will remain unchanged in the order
of redemption any more than our bodies will. Augustine speculates that
though women will retain their sex they will not indulge in sexual
intercourse nor give birth, for he does not believe that such things belong
to the order of redemption. Both he and Paul speculate on what our
transformed bodies will be like: ‘spiritual bodies’ Paul calls them, and
Augustine insists reassuringly that they will neither be too fat nor to
thin, too short nor too tall, too old nor too young, and that physical
defects will be removed.32 As there is so little evidence on which to base
such remarks, this detailed speculation about the order of redemption may be
interesting, and even theologically profound, but is probably not to be
relied upon too heavily! Its importance lies only in the reminder that we do
not really know what our redeemed gender-identities will be like, and that
they certainly cannot therefore be simply equated with their current
manifestations.
So important strands in the Christian tradition tell us that our gender
identities are a real part of us, and that they will persist in the order of
redemption. They insist that gendered identity has an eternal significance
and must be transformed along with every part of us in order to conform to
the image of God in which we are all made. But there is also a refusal to
let our gendered identity become so important that it prevents us from
taking on this new nature, or completely determines what this new nature is
to be. Our gender identity is to be understood as part of our essential,
God-given, nature, a nature which is both bodily and spiritual, natural and
cultural. Christianity has little interest in the distinction between sex as
natural and gender as constructed which has been so influential in feminist
theory. For Christianity _everything_ is constructed, and the question which
matters is whether it is constructed by Godly or ungodly forces. The
distinction which matters for Christianity is not that between nature and
culture or body and spirit, but that between old creation and new, between
that which belongs to the old order of corruption and that which belongs to
the new order of redemption. For gender involves body and soul, nature and
culture, and it is as gendered that we enter either into the realm of
corruption or of redemption — or into struggle between the two.
_Conclusion_
I have been arguing against what I see as feminist theology’s unhelpful
tendency to seek refuge from anxieties about identity in the security of a
defined, delimited and innocent women’s identity. I have suggested that such
a strategy is idolatrous: it reduces my God-given reality to less than it
really is; it leads me to supress some aspects of my identity and to cling
uncritically to others; it restricts my freedom and ties me to an identity
which reduces and restricts; it limits and pre-ordains the nature of my
relationships both with the divine and with other human beings; and it
forecloses on my relationships with members of the opposite sex. In doing
all this it acts to keep all my relationships within bounds and under
control and prevents that openness to God and to others in which alone I can
grow and flourish.
It has been no part of my intention to suggest that Christianity has been
wholly on the side of the angels where these issues of identity are
concerned. I have tried to point out that the church has also been guilty of
wishing to foreclose on human — and gender — identity. Likewise, much
Christian theology and most Christian institutions continue to be
spectacularly bad at accommodating our differently sexed identities. Despite
Paul’s remarks about the distinct and individual nature of the different
members of the one body, the church has often tried to force men — and more
often women — into very narrow, restrictive and reduced identities. It
often fails to accept that all are equally members of Christ’s body _in_
their difference and not _in spite_ of it.
Clearly then, Christianity has been as guilty as much feminist theology of
wanting to prescribe and proscribe male and female identity in life-denying
and impossibly restrictive ways. Like feminism too it has sometimes wanted
to understand this controlled Christian identity as innocent, and to view
those who will not accept it as sinful. Part of the very great value of
feminist theology lies in its having opened our eyes to these sins, failing,
and distortions.
My intention in this talk has not been to deny any of these criticisms of
the Christian tradition, but to show that there are also powerful and
constitutive elements of that tradition which stand in judgement on such
manipulations of identity, and which remind us that by God’s grace we are
always more than any attempt we or others may make to seize hold of our
identity. To cling to my identity as a woman, a homosexual, a Barthian, a
person of colour — or whatever — is not just to reject God, but to reject
our true selves. I do not deny that Christianity may often have been used to
reinforce this grasping at identity. What I do deny is that this is all
Christianity has to say about identity. I have tried to show how much _more_
Christianity has to say, how it can speak to the contemporary situation, and
how it can help set us free from our anxious quest for an identity which is
self-contained, self-controlled autonomous, and entirely within my own
control.
1 According to the _Oxford English Dictionary_ (2nd ed., Vol. XIV, pp.
906-907) it is first used thus by Thomas Traherne in 1674.
2 For a useful summary account of this position see Stuart Hall, David Held
and Tony McGrew, _Modernity and Its Futures_. Oxford: Polity Press in
association with the Open University, 1992, pp.274-316.
3 Christopher Lasch, _The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations_. New York: Norton, 1978.
4 By even speaking of ‘feminist theology’ one lays oneself open to the
charge that there is no such uniform of homogeneous body of discourse. I
know this to be true, and in what follows I do not for a moment wish to
suggest that my critique applies to _all_ feminist theology.
5 Rosemary Radford Ruether, _Sexism and God-Talk: towards a feminist
theology_. London: SCM, 1983, p. 13. Author’s italics.
6 Ibid., p. 19.
7Carol P. Christ, ‘Spiritual Quest and Women’s Experience’, in Carol P.
Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., _Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in
Religion_. Harper San Francisco, 1992, p.279.
8 Ibid, p.8. Authors’ italics.
9 For example, Lisa Isherwood and Dorothea McEwan write of women’s
experience that, ‘when it is authentic for the individual, [it] is
normative… It may have very many different expressions; it might be the
acceptance of the traditional understanding of women’s bodily experiences,
menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, menopause and illnesses connected with
the female physiology or it might be the understanding of liberation in the
spirit beyond those biological givens, and any combination on the spectrum
that extends from the one to the other’ (_Introducing Feminist Theology_.
Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1993, pp.81-82). Compare Linda Hogan’s
more nuanced study _From Women’s Experience to Feminist Theology_.
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995, which, whilst makes a plea for a
more pluralistic understanding of women’s experience, continues to insist
that the most fundamental aspect of this experience is the experience of
oppression.
10 See, for example, the chapter entitled, ‘The Bonds of Freedom: Sisterhood
as Antichurch’, in _Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation_. London: Women’s Press, 1986.
11 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, _Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet.
Critical Issues in Feminist Christology_. London: SCM 1994. See especially
pp.50-57.
12 Felicity Edwards, ‘Spirituality, Consciousness and Gender Identification:
a neo-feminist Perspective’, in Ursula King, ed., _Religion and Gender_.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, pp. 189-190.
13 Again, Daly seems to have been pioneering in establishing this complex of
ideas, a complex which is already present in _Beyond God the Father_.
14 Linda Woodhead, ‘Spiritualising the Sacred: A Critique of Feminist
Theology’, _Modern Theology_, Vol. 13 No.2, April 1997, pp. 191-212.
15 Gilligan’s conclusions about the differences between male and female
moral development have not gone unchallenged. For an account of the debate
see James Q. Wilson, _The Moral Sense_. New York: The Free Press, 1993, pp.
179-182.
16 William Wilberforce, _A Practical New of the Prevailing Religious System
of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country,
Compared with Real Christianity._ London: Caddell and Davies, 1797, p.376.
My attention was drawn to this and the following quotation by Helen Plant’s
unpublished MA essay, ‘The Interaction of Gender and Class in Anglican
Evangelical Social and Political Thought, c. 1790 -1820′. Lancaster
University, 1996.
17 Hannah More, _Considerations on Religion and Public Education_. London,
1792. Reproduced in Augustan Reprint Society 262, 1990, p.238.
18 Indeed Luce Irigaray seems to me one of the most interesting and fruitful
dialogue partner for Christians in relation to the whole debate about
gender. Not only is she aware of the Christian tradition and in some ways
sympathetic to it, she is critical of just those elements of feminism and
feminist theology which seem to me the most antithetical to Christianity. A
bibliography of Irigaray’s works can be found in Margaret Whitford, _Luce
Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine_, London: Routledge, 1991. See also
Tina Chanter, _Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers_,
London: Routledge, 1995. Irigaray engages directly with feminist theology in
her critique of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s _In Memory of Her: _’Equal to
Whom_?_’, in _differences_, i.2, pp. 59-67.
19 S. Wilkinson and C. Kitzinger, eds., _Heterosexuality: a Feminism and
Psychology Reader_. London: Sage, 1993, p.22.
20 Mary McClintock Fulkerson, _Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and
Feminist Theology_, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994.
21 Angela West offers a powerful critique of this cluster of ideas in her
book _Deadly Innocence_.
22See Nancy Tatorn Ammerman, _Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern
World_. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987, pp.72-102.
23 _Heterosexuality_, p.76.
24 See Seyla Benhabib. _Situating the Self: Gender, Community and
Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics_, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
25 This phrase occurs in a slightly different context in Oliver O’Donovan’s
_Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline For Evangelical Ethics_,
Leicester, IVP, 1986, p31.
26 See, for example, Karl Barth, _Church Dogmatics_, III/1,trs. G.W.
Bromiley, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958, pp 95-97.
27 Saiving’s essay, originally published in _The Journal of Religion_, April
1960, is republished in C. Christ and J. Plaskow, eds., _Womanspirit
Rising_, pp. 25-42.
28 I owe this insight to Nicholas Peter Harvey, author of _Death’s gift:
Chapters on Resurrection and Bereavement_. London, Epworth Press, 1985 and
_The Morals of Jesus_. London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1991.
29 _City of God_, Book XXII, Ch 17.
30 See Paul Ramsey’s ‘Human Sexuality in the History of Redemption’, in
_Journal of Religious Ethics_, 16, 1, Spring 1988, pp.56-86, where Ramsey
shows the importance of Augustine’s insistence that both sex and the body
must be viewed within the context of the history of redemption.
31 As Rosemary Radford Ruether says of the afterlife, ‘In effect our
existence ceases as individuated ego/organism and dissolves back into the
cosmic matrix of matter/energy.. It is this matrix, rather than our
individuated centers of being, that is “everlasting”‘. _Sexism and
God-Talk_, p.257.
32 See, for example, _City of God_, Book XXII, Chsl5-20.