She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. - book reviews

Almost twenty years have passed since Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973) explicitly challenged the symbolic structure of traditional Christianity from a feminist perspective. The subsequent debate has intensified and broadened. Some feminists, like Daly herself, decided that Christianity is irrevocably committed to sexist structures, and left. Others, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell, Anne Carr, and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, have worked out a variety of options for negotiating the tension between Christian faith and feminist commitment. Rather than leave in pursuit of a more comfortable spirituality, they have accepted the uncomfortable role of the loyal opposition.

Their refusal to leave and their insistence on continuing to speak within the church has forced the recognition that feminism is something more than a temporary crisis. The feminist theological agenda, furthermore, has extended beyond the moral denunciation of sexist patterns in church and society to encompass an ever more explicit engagement with the central symbols of the Christian tradition. Alvin F. Kimel, the editor of Speaking the Christian God, distinguishes between "fads in theology that come and go," and this movement, which not only critiques traditional ways of thinking about God and Christ, but also "embodies this critique in very practical directives that alter the church's speech and prayer." Kimel therefore says, "A revolution is now taking place in the worship and discourse of English-speaking Christianity."

His assessment is neither melodramatic nor inaccurate. The debate reflected in these books has a historic dimension comparable to that involving Gnosticism in the second century C.E., for it implicates the whole range of Christian ethos (identity) and praxis (practice), as both derive from the disputed territory of Christian logos (speech). The outcome of this wide-ranging and sometimes acrimonious debate will affect the shape of Christianity for succeeding generations, including the ways in which the Christian community defines its sense of historical continuity.

The eighteen essays that Kimel has gathered in Speaking the Christian God clearly have a counterrevolutionary purpose. They are written by battle-tested veterans, virtually all of whom can cite previous and fuller studies dealing with the disputed issues. They unite in a flat rejection of the premises and conclusions of what they perceive as a radical feminism. While they reveal varying degrees of sympathy with the intellectual efforts of their opponents, they all claim a commitment to women's political and social equality. They insist, in fact, that such is demanded by the Christian ethos. But they emphatically reject the project of radical feminism.

But what constitutes "radical feminism" and demands its rejection by Christian theologians? It is nothing less than the application of a feminist critique to the very language about God and Christ, and, by implication, to the adequacy and authority of biblical revelation. But wait: all the way back to Elizabeth Cady Stanton there was a challenge to Paul's statement that women should be silent in the assembly (1 Cor. 14:33-36; 1 Tim. 2:11-15). How did we get to the suggestion that calling God "She" might not be a bad thing?

The authors of these essays think that the progression from the edges of social critique to the heart of Trinitarian theology was from the start implicit in the premises of feminism. Thus the global and principle-based character of their rejection. Another observer might perceive that the protest against sexist practices met such unreasonable resistance that this conclusion grew inescapable: practice could not change without a change in ideology. The true force of Daly's unforgettable aphorism became more evident: "If God is male, then the male is God." Whichever analysis is correct, the combatants at least agree that something fundamental is afoot.

The essays in Speaking the Christian God are generally civil in tone, although a polemical edge is not lacking. Only occasionally does a scarcely controlled animus disrupt the tone of reasonable discourse, and broad characterization replace analysis. This is particularly the case, unfortunately for overall impressions, with the opening and closing essays by Elizabeth Achtemeier ("Exchanging God for |No Gods'") and Leslie Ziegler ("Christianity or Feminism").

The authors demonstrate decent acquaintance with some important primary feminist sources, although a sympathetic reading of them is rarer (mainly in the essays by Janet Soskice, J.A. DeNoiia, and Ray Anderson). The index confirms a reader's impression that although Mary Daly and Rebecca Chopp and Isabel Carter Heyward and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza all come in for discussion or criticism, the several books of Rosemary Radford Ruether and above all Sallie McFague's Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear (1987) are favorite targets.

The contributors were obviously given a free hand to shape their essays, with the result that there is considerable overlapping of themes. The authors repetitively bewail what they regard as the feminists' (especially McFague's) inadequate grasp of metaphor; they question whether there is something identifiable as "Women's Experience"; they attribute the feminist agenda to a faulty worldview, alternatively characterized as Kantian dualism, monism, projectionism, Gnosticism; they express regret at the realization that changing language about God will not get feminists "what they really want."

More substantively, the essayists frequently assert that changing language about God threatens the symbolic framework of traditional Christianity, challenges the absoluteness and authoritativeness of biblical revelation, and (most seriously) shakes the foundations of Christology. These last are indeed weighty issues, requiring of all those committed to true speaking about God and loyalty to the gift God has entrusted to the church both intense labor and great delicacy.

In fact, I share the essayists' sense of outrage at the ways in which many changes have been brought about in lectionaries (not only with respect to inclusive language!) and liturgical texts through politically correct committees, changes imposed on the people previous to the necessarily slow and patient process of education and discernment such momentous alterations demand. Precisely because, to use Elizabeth Johnson's expression, speech about God takes place "at the intersection of mighty concerns," the most exquisite loyalty, love, and delicacy must be used in its deployment, for the identity of the people as well as the truth about God is at stake. Surely we by now should be able to agree that these are not matters for lobbying and political pressure and manipulation, but matters requiring passionate and prayerful doing of the truth in love.

But although the concerns raised by the essayists are legitimate, their criticisms sometimes on target, and their anxiety about where all this will lead appropriate, this collection of essays, taken as a major statement concerning the central issues, is a disappointment. The tendency toward broad characterization (especially in terms of a supposed "worldview" intrinsically incompatible with Christianity) is a form of trivialization inappropriate to serious debate, and reflects a failure to adequately apprehend either the moral or the intellectual integrity of the feminist positions.

There is therefore an issue of moral credibility when the essayists consider it sufficient to assert in a by-the-way fashion that they are entirely in favor of "full rights for women" without acknowledging the ways in which Christianity has helped sponsor structures that have suppressed those rights. It is entirely disingenuous to defend the intention of the Scripture's language without at least confessing that in fact the use of that language has been abusive, even and sometimes especially by earlier staunch defenders of orthodoxy and tradition.

There is an issue of intellectual credibility when the feminist critique is posed entirely in terms of "what women want," as though it were entirely a self-serving enterprise by women "always learning [who] can never arrive at the knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 3:7). If feminist scholarship is heard more accurately, the issue concerns not what women want but what humanity, male and female, needs. And women's learning is precisely a distinctive approximation of the truth about God that enables both men and women to grow. These assertions may be right or wrong, but a response that does not acknowledge them cannot be viewed as adequate.

Lacking a generous appreciation of feminists' loyalty or goals, the essays in Speaking the Christian God increasingly manifest a defensive closure against dangerous "outsiders" rather than an open discussion with faithful if perhaps distanced colleagues. As a result, the very invocation of tradition as a tamper-proof product appears self-interested, and so simplistically stated as to suggest not only that God's revelation is entirely something of the past, but also comprehensively and unambiguously contained in the literal words of Scripture, creed, and liturgy. In less defensive a posture, one wonders how comfortable these authors would be with such an etiolated understanding of symbolum and definitio. In any case, the perception that theology has to do with the living God who continues to speak to people in their present experiences, and that theology, if it is not to fall into willful blindness, must always remain attentive to God's self-disclosure in the world, and that this self-disclosure is characteristically surprising, paradoxical, and upsetting of accustomed verities, is absent from this book. As a result, however kindly delivered, the cumulative message from these authors to "women" can be beard as "be silent, or leave."

The earlier published efforts by Elizabeth Johnson are given relatively positive notice by the essayists in Speaking the Christian God, which made me wish that her most recent book had been available to them. Perhaps their response would have been somewhat different, for Johnson's She Who Is, so far as I can tell, is the most substantial and sophisticated effort yet undertaken to connect "feminist and classical wisdom" in a synthesis at once bold and discerning, critical and doxological, at once engaged with the classical sources of Christian theology and committed to a vision of Christianity pervasively and profoundly marked by feminist values.

The peculiar power of this book may owe something to the fact that Johnson is a Roman Catholic nun. Unlike some Protestant feminists, therefore, she has survived within a communion which is still the most patriarchal in its structures and systematically repressive of women, not only in recondite matters of language, but in the specifics of practice. Johnson is therefore able to show how a "male centered Christology" shapes sexist practice by citing the egregious argument from the "Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ordained Priesthood" that men should be ordained and women not because men have a more natural resemblance to Christ than women do, an argument whose logic could be pursued so as to restrict priesthood only to sandal-wearing Jewish peasants from Galilee. Johnson's moral passion is rooted in specific experience.

But her Roman Catholicism also shows in the capaciousness of her theological vision. The essayists in Speaking the Christian God worried about feminists' "pantheism," but as Johnson shows, some version of that understanding of God's relation to the world underlies a great deal of the very best Roman Catholic theology of this century. The same essayists worry about the status of metaphor versus simile, but Johnson is able to delve into Augustine and Aquinas and show just how radical those pillars of the tradition were in their assertions concerning the via negativa and how cautious they were about the via analogia and how thoroughly inadequate (indeed misleading) they regarded the via positiva if it has not been tempered by apophatic criticism, with its emphasis on the inadequacy of our attempts to describe God. Likewise, Roman Catholic theology as it developed from Rahner into various liberation models showed itself profoundly comfortable with the notion that the revelation of God continues in our world, and that the narratives of human experience form a legitimate basis for rereading and reinterpreting the sacred texts of the tradition. It therefore seems logical to suggest that "women's experience" also might legitimately be thought to have a certain revelatory quality if carefully discerned and interpreted.

A proper assessment of Johnson's work begins with the recognition that it is truly a theological rather than a political instrument. it is not a tract for the times but a treatise De Deo Trino. By no means does she consider God-talk irrelevant to, practical issues. She fully subscribes to the feminist critique

of sexist practices, and takes as axiomatic the feminist principle that symbols give rise to praxis. Thus, exclusively masculine language about God leads to and provides ideological support for patriarchal social arrangements. But her treatise does not directly address what should be done. Rather, it entertains the question of how God should be spoken. Following the lead of Paul Ricoeur's principle that "symbol gives rise to thought," she attempts to demonstrate how the use of female symbols can enrich our thinking about God.

Although clothed in extraordinarily rich and evocative language, her argument proceeds in systematic fashion. There are four parts to her exposition. Part I is programmatic. She places her endeavor within the "mighty concerns" of contemporary social issues as well as current feminist and theological debates. Of special importance here is her insistence that the choice now before us involves an openness to the "Glory of God" (understood in Irenaeus's terms as a "humanity fully alive") or a "scotosis" (meaning a "darkening" of the light willfully chosen). Also significant are her three choices among multiple linguistic options. She will not abandon the name "God," (to replace it with "Goddess" or "God/ess".); she chooses "female" images rather than "feminine" ones, because of the way language about "feminine/masculine" attributes tend to reinforce harmful stereotypes concerning both men and women; and, she chooses "equivalent images," rather than the replacement of male images with female ones.

The last point is of particular significance, showing the fundamentally irenic, tentative, and constructive character of her argument: "Theoretically, I endorse the ideal of language for God in male and female terms used equivalently, as well as the use of cosmic and metaphysical symbols...this book's choice to use mainly female symbolism for God, let me state clearly, is not intended as a strategy of substitution, still less of reversal. Rather it is the investigation of a suppressed world directed ultimately toward the design of a new whole."

Part 2 of her exposition examines the "resources for emancipatory speech about God," as found in women's interpreted experience, Scripture and its trajectories, and in classical theology. A word on each topic: Johnson does not suggest that women have distinctive experiential or cognitive access to God (see Morelli's essay in Speaking the Christian God) but rather that women's historical experience of the world in its specific social systems has both a positive and a negative revelatory potential. The lessons of such experience can help both men and women see how destructive purely patriarchal systems are, and can provide alternative images of social life (human and divine) predicated on solidarity and intimacy rather than on dominance. Scripture, in turn, offers far more than the occasional female metaphor or simile. Particularly in the female personification of Wisdom (Hochma/sophia) it provides a spectrum of specifically female images for divine activity in the world and among humans: activities of creating, sustaining, calling, teaching, inspiring, saving, judging. It is, of course, noteworthy that the most splendid examples are found in the Book of Wisdom, which Catholics recognize as canonical and Protestants do not.

Finally, the classical theological tradition, for all of its explicit marginalization of the female (her dissection of Aquinas on this point is exquisite), also offers unexpected but rich possibilities of "emancipatory discourse" about God. Here Johnson's argument exposes the implications of apophatic theology, which insists on God's incomprehensibility. All language about God, even revealed language about God, cannot adequately comprehend the mystery which even when spoken remains ungraspable by any human mind or words. Johnson also examines the implications of analogical speech about God, especially the way in which it always presupposes a critique of positive affirmations, and always asserts the dimension of "greater dissimilarity" even as it acknowledges the possibility of "similarity" in attribute between human and divine realms. Finally, she suggests that classical theology also legitimates the use of "many names" for God, without in principle excluding the legitimacy of female names.

In my reading, this is the heart of Johnson's argument, and the element that makes her book necessary reading for anyone wishing to pursue this issue in a responsible way. Johnson has carried the discussion to the heart of the classical tradition, and suggests that the truest reading of that tradition's own principles legitimates her project. Any rebuttal of Johnson, I submit, must argue from the same ground that she has now occupied. And from that height, she asserts that language about "father and son" is neither so perspicuous nor so "proper" a language about God as (for example) the essayists of the other volume suggest.

Allow me to make the terms of the argument specific. If female language about God is inadequate and ambiguous and requires negative critique and the relativization by other terms, lest we think of God as "a woman," or, even worse, in terms of "nature goddesses" of ancient Near Eastern mythology, so also does male language about God (yes, even that spoken by Jesus) require a negative critique and relativization by other terms, lest we think of God as "a man" or even worse in terms of the barbaric war god of ancient Israelite henotheism. Johnson's argument here is compelling, and has the effect of defining its rejection as a form of "scotosis." The Nicene Creed itself shows that the biblical symbols of "Father/son" can be misapprehended when taken literally, and require critique and correction by other terms, as it offers these qualifications: "begotten from the father before all the ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in substance with the father."

In parts 3 and 4 of her book, Johnson turns to her constructive project. She begins with "speaking about God from the world's history," which means in effect that her analysis proceeds from the "economic trinity" revealed in the human story, to language about "the trinity in itself." That procedure is also rooted in traditional theological method. What is innovative is her choice of moving from the human encounter with "Spirit/sophia" in the world, to the specifically Christian teaching of Incarnation and Resurrection through "Jesus/sophia," and from these to "Mother/sophia," the originating power at work in all this mysterious self-disposition in the world and the human story. In this section, Johnson applies her method of critique, retrieval, amplification. The brilliance of starting with the human encounter with Spirit[wisdom, of course, is that already in the biblical tradition, this "face of God" is either genderless or female. If the reader is sufficiently bold to conceive of the "Spirit-god" in such terms, the next more difficult steps are taken more easily.

What about the key issue of the Incarnation, and the centrality of Jesus in the Christian tradition? I find Johnson's treatment to be thoroughly orthodox in substance if daring in expression. As even the authors of Speaking the Christian God acknowledge, the language of "sonship" is not the only appropriate language concerning Christology; biblical references to Jesus as God's "child," for example (Acts 3:13, 26; 4:17, 30), are not gender-specific. But Johnson is not interested in denying the maleness of the human Jesus. Indeed, she is attracted to the "fittingness" of his having been male,, since his kenosis (self-emptying) thereby by involves God's own critique of patriarchy: humans are saved not by a dominant distant male, but by a male who empties himself out in service and invites all to a life so defined. Johnson's argument is rather that Jesus' maleness is an accidental rather than an essential feature of Incarnation. She sees that our refusal even to consider that God could have become incarnate in a woman is one of the most telling symptoms of the disease the feminist critique seeks to diagnose. She argues, furthermore (surely correctly), that not the incidental facts of Jesus' life are salvific, but, as Paul argued, the fundamental pattern of obedience and love which was enacted through those specific incidents. Finally, she asserts that "Christ for us" is now no longer the historical (male) Jesus, but rather the resurrected one, the cosmic Christ whose genderless Spirit touches and transforms both female and male lives.

In the last section of her treatise, Johnson considers "the dense symbols and their dark light" of the inner life of the Triune God. It is a rich and fascinating discussion, deeply engaged not only with classical Trinitarian doctrine (especially Augustine's) but also with a variety of recent systematic theologies. By the time she comes to consider the essential life of God as "She Who is," the reader is neither shocked nor repelled, for the precise and positive intentionality of that language has been thoroughly established. It is entirely characteristic of this work, however, that the final chapter does not consider God in splendid isolation, but returns again to the involvement of God with the human story as the "suffering God: compassion poured out."

It is obvious that I consider Johnson's book to be challenging and important. Its methodological awareness, its systematic character, its thorough engagement with the tradition, its irenic and constructive tone, its poetic and even prayerful language, all mark it as a significant advance in the debate over the appropriateness of female language about God and even the value of the feminist agenda. I do not suggest that Johnson's work is without fault. Sometimes her own language grows mushy with affect; sometimes she is so open and generous in her sensibilities that she can be challenged as uncritical concerning contemporary ethos; certainly her tendency to dismiss everything negative about women as the result of "feminization" within patriarchal structures requires close and critical examination.

But excesses and lapses are in my judgment redeemed by Johnson's two most remarkable accomplishments: she has refused to abandon or dismiss or trivialize the tradition. Instead, she has sought by a faithful yet critical reading to enrich it. And she has performed the most fundamental function of a true theologian, which is to provide a vision of God worthy of prayer. Because she has tried to find language more capacious of the many dimensions of the living God who calls us to a share in the glory which is fullness of life, and because the language she has found does not diminish but deepens our doxologies, she has provided at least this reader with an "emancipatory discourse," whose first freedom is the freedom to pray.

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