(3 of 3)
St. Paul, too, has come in for rehabilitation. His admonitions to the women of Corinth may have merely been sound advice: Corinth was a mixed community of Jew and Gentile Christians, and Paul probably feared that the more liberated Greek women would offend the Jews if they did not wear veils or spoke up too loudly during services. Jewish Theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, in a new book, My Brother Paul, admits that Paul's theology is pointedly masculine for much of its course, but sees a feminine image in Paul's vision of the "restoration of all things" in Christ at the end of time. That restoration culminates in a return to the primordial garden—Mother Earth again.
Divine Presence. Despite such apologies and defenses, at least a few feminist theologians argue that Judaeo-Christian theology is still far too dominated by male concepts. Boston College's Mary Daly, a Roman Catholic laywoman, says a woman's revolution within the church is needed to overturn the patriarchal, male idea of leadership, which she describes as hyper-rational and aggressive. With it would go the masculine habit of constructing boundaries between "self" and "other." Gone, too, would be a God who keeps mankind in "infantile subjection." The new God would "encourage self-actualization and social commitment." Daly also sees a de-emphasis of Jesus: "The idea of a unique divine incarnation in a human being of male sex may give way to an increased awareness of the divine presence in all human beings."
Another Catholic feminist, Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether of Howard University, suggests that a rise of feminine influence would liberate men as well as women by overthrowing man's technological empire—a "denatured Babel of concrete and steel." Then, says Ruether, men and women together could "learn to cultivate the garden . . . where the powers of rationalization come together with the harmonies of nature."
Ironically, Daly, and to some extent Ruether, seem to be practicing what they preach against: gender stereotyping. They do not seem to recognize that power could possibly corrupt women, just as it has men. Many theologians would also reject Mary Daly's dismissal of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. He was incarnated as a man and chose male apostles, they would argue, because that was the need of his time: a female Messiah (and even female apostles) would have been outlandish. But there is no reason that Jesus and his Apostles could not represent feminine aspirations in their own humanity.
One prescient forebear of Ruether and Daly saw no problem in Jesus' manhood. Nor did she seem rattled by masculine pronouns for God. Lady Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who lived in Chaucerian England in the 14th century, laid out her prophetic theology in a book called Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. "God, Almighty, is our kindly Father," wrote Lady Julian. "God, all-Wisdom, is our kindly Mother." As for the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity—the Person incarnated in Jesus Christ—Lady Julian found that he was strongly feminine: "our Mother in kind, in whom we are grounded and rooted. And he is our Mother in Mercy."