“Can a Male Savior Save Women?” Feminists on Atonement
“Can a Male Savior Save Women?” Feminists on Atonement
Jesus of Nazareth was a male Jew who lived at a specific moment in history and inhabited a specific culture. So how can this specific individual have universal significance? Part of the Christian answer is given by the doctrine of the incarnation, which affirms the importance of Jesus of Nazareth for all times, races, genders, nations, and cultures. The rise of feminism has, however, seen this question reopened. In 1983, the leading Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether (born 1936) opened a chapter of her book Sexism and God-Talk with the question: “Can a male savior save women?” This sharply posed question has generated considerable discussion.
Ruether herself took the view that the maleness of Jesus of Nazareth was not of decisive importance in this matter. What really mattered was his liberating prophetic message. The message is primary; the messenger secondary. More radical feminists disagreed. Daphne Hampson (born 1944) and Mary Daly (1928–2010) both answered the question in the negative, though for different reasons. Hampson pointed to the dominance of male imagery within the Christian tradition, and further questioned whether a particular individual could have universal significance. Daly focused on the situation of women, arguing that they needed to be saved from men rather than by a man.
Yet feminist discussion of the atonement has moved on beyond the specific question of the maleness of Christ as savior. Increasingly, the mode of redemption has become the focus of attention, with particular criticism being directed against ideas such as substitutionary atonement and a sacrificial death. For example, Beverly W. Harrison (1932–2012) and Carter Heyward (born 1945) speak of the “sadomasochism” implicit in Anselm of Canterbury's theory of the atonement, which is analyzed in terms of authorized violence and social domination. God is the sadist who inflicts punishment and Jesus the masochist who willingly accepts it. Joanne Brown and Rebecca Parker argue that the idea of a Father sending his son to suffer and die on a cross promotes an “abusive theology” that amounts to “child abuse” and “glorifies suffering.” “Is it any wonder that there is so much abuse in modern society when the predominant image or theology of the culture is of ‘divine child abuse' – God the Father demanding and carrying out the suffering and death of his own son?” Accordingly, the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross was an evil, unnecessary, violent, unjust act done by humans which should not be glorified, and cannot be justified.
In many feminist works, the cross is seen not so much as a symbol of salvation but rather as a symbol of the injustice that is so often meted out to the righteous. The cross is therefore not so much the ground of salvation as a protest against the injustice of the world. The cross may indeed be a tragedy; it is not, however, redemptive. Such approaches naturally lead into a discussion of how suffering can be transformed, rather than passively accepted.
Yet some feminist writers are disturbed that such a reading of the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth is linguistically and historically naïve. The Cambridge theologian Janet Martin Soskice (born 1951), for example, has expressed concern that some feminist approaches simply “ignore the symbolic complexity of religious language” and leave us with an unhistorical, decontextualized, and genderless person or principle who, or which, is somehow meant to be both inspirational and foundational for faith.
The difficulty with many feminist retellings of the story of Jesus is that they leave us with such thin fare. Anything sexist, violent, and hierarchical must go; so gone is talk of fathers, kings, lords, and blood. What we have left is a genderless Good Figure who (or which) runs the risk of losing all historical particularity.
It is too early to draw firm conclusions about these lines of argument, other than to note the important and often productive debates that they have occasioned. For example, the Mennonite writer Denny J. Weaver has developed an approach to atonement which makes use of feminist critiques of violence. In The Nonviolent Atonement (2001), Weaver sets out an approach to atonement – a “narrative Christus victor” – which locates the saving work of Jesus of Nazareth in his struggle against, and ultimate triumph over, the structural evil powers of this world. It is also clear that proponents of more traditional approaches to the atonement, aware of feminist critiques and perspectives, have re-examined the biblical foundations and some influential statements of these traditional positions to explore whether they can be reformulated in ways that meet these concerns.