Feminist Theology

http://fth.sagepub.com The Politics of God in the Christian Tradition

Rosemary Radford Ruether Feminist Theology 2009; 17; 329 DOI: 10.1177/0966735009102362 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/3/329

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Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC http://FTH.sagepub.com Vol. 17(3): 329-338 DOI: 10.1177/0966735009102362

The Politics of God in the Christian Tradition

Rosemary Radford Ruether
RRuether@psr.edu

ABSTRaCT
This article traces the development of the idea of God from the ancient Near East thought into Patristic Christianity with its fusion with Greek philosophy. The article details five patterns that shape the way in which God language in Christianity influences social and political systems: androcentrism or male domination over women; anthropocentrism or human domination over nature; ethnocentrism or the domination of a chosen people over other people; militarism, and asceticism or the dualism and hierarchy of mind over body. It also suggests how these patterns of domination can be dismantled and more mutual relations between God, humans and nature developed. Keywords: androcentrism, anthropocentrism, asceticism, ethnocen trism, militarism

Christianity has a problem with God or rather with its ideas about God. These ideas have complex origins in the evolution of culture in the ancient Near East and in Western religious traditions. The problem with these ideas is their tendency to androcentrism, anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, militarism and ascetic dualism. Yet these traditions also have countervailing patterns that include female imagery for the divine, solidarity with the poor and a quest for universal justice and wellbeing for the whole creation. In this paper I will try to unpack key dimensions of these dilemmas, although to do so adequately would take a large book, not a 14 page paper. I will start with a brief overview of the history of God from the Canaanites and Hebrews to classical Christianity. Some might insist that I should begin with the ancient Goddesses of Paleolithic times. It has been popular among some movements of feminist spirituality to claim that the original understanding of the deity was that of a Great Goddess who was immanent in the life processes of nature with no hierarchy of men over women, humanity over nature, masters over slaves. While
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such an idea of deity is a very good idea, it is, as far as I can tell, a modern construct developed to counteract the ideas of God we have received from the patriarchal past. Whether such an idea of a Great Goddess was the original view of deity in Paleolithic times is uncertain. To know the ideas of past times, we are dependent on texts, themselves not easy to interpret. In the context of the history of writing such texts are only present from about the third millennium BCE. By that time the writing of texts was controlled by scribes at the service of ancient aristocracies and so reflect the god-language of these aristocracies. So I start my story, not with a hypothetical concept of an original matricentric egalitarian Goddess, but with the god-language of these ancient texts, specifically with the Canaanites as the background to the Hebrew understanding of the divine. Sumero-Akkadian, Babylonian and Canaanite cultures saw divinity as a two-gendered, multi-generational quarrelsome family. This family included an ancient grandmother and her consort; her son, the father god and his queen-wife; and their quarrelsome offspring, male and female. Prominent among their offspring was a vibrant young Goddess who expressed exuberant sexuality and aggressive warfare. She is not a mother goddess and has no interest in children. She is paired with a somewhat passive god who represents rain and vegetation, and who dies, defeated by the powers of drought and death, and whom she resurrects and enthrones on the seat of power in the heavenly and natural world. In Canaanite thought this pair was named Anath and Baal, while the father god and his queen were El and Asherah. Hebrew thought grew up as a part of the Canaanite world and revised its ideas. It adopted as its tribal God a deity called Yahweh, who it identified with the father God El. This identification of Yahweh with El meant that there lingered until about the sixth century BCE popular traditions that believed that Yahweh had a wife, Asherah. Only gradually was Asherah turned into a symbolic tree-pole and then driven out of the place of worship in the temple in Jerusalem. However, this did not mean that all female imagery disappeared from Hebrew religion. In the fourth to first centuries BCE Hebrew sages reinvented a female consort or mediator of the male god, Wisdom. Later Jewish mysticism developed an idea of a mediating female counterpart of the male God, Gods Shekinah. So although the official concept of God gradually developed in Hebrew thought was that of a universal, male monotheistic deity, remnants of the female consort of God never full disappeared. Central to Jewish understanding of its national God, Yahweh, was that this God had chosen them to be his people and had given them the laws of life. They should worship him alone. Infidelity to their God brought stern punishment. This did not originally mean that other
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gods did not exist, but that this God alone should the people of Israel worship. I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other gods before me. Gradually Hebrew thinkers universalized this God of Israel, claiming he was the only God who existed. All other gods were false idols. Other nations should come to worship this one true God, but this demand was part of a hope for a future world order when Israel would rule the other nations. The God of Israel remained tribal, but with imperial aspirations. In the Hebrew Scriptures the chief rival of Yahweh is Baal. Yahweh seeks to supplant the worship of Baal, taking over from Baal the functions of providing rain and fertility. Yahweh also appropriates from Anath her aggressive militarism, but not her exuberant sexuality. Two characteristics of Anath and Baal are distanced from Yahweh, sex and death. Unlike Anath and Baal, the Hebrew God is not pictured as having sex, or a sex organ, although he makes wives fertile; i.e. opens the womb. And although he causes much death, especially in war, death does not touch him. Sex and death become areas of pollution taboos which the observant should not touch in order to remain pure and so able to enter into the presence of Yahweh. Christianity built on and revised the Hebrew view of God. By linking the Hebrew God with the crucified/resurrected prophet-Messiah, Jesus, it embraced the dying and rising God of Baalism. But it rejected the exuberant sexuality of Anath who resurrects and enthrones him. Christs death and resurrection is played out as obedience to God the Father, overcoming human sin and death. In the cult of Mary, Jesus mother, and of Mother Church, Christianity develops an asexual female consort of the male God who is simultaneously the bride and mother of Gods son, Christ, while remaining a virgin. Christianity also revised the strict monotheism of Hebrew theology to create a triune God who is both unitary and plural, one and three, to encompass God the Father, the Wisdom or Word of God incarnate in Jesus and the presence of the divine in creation and redemption, the Holy Spirit. Initially Christianity rejected the tribal nationalism of the Hebrew God for a universal God of all nations. But it carried over the idea of the divine election of a chosen people, transferring this to a church from all nations. By the fourth century CE it linked this idea of a universal church, called to convert all nations, to a universal Roman Empire called to rule all nations. Thus, its universalism became identified with imperialism, with an expanding rule of an elect people of God who alone represents the true God. Through them his religion is destined to triumph over all other peoples of the earth. This imperialism was then linked with the militaristic God and warrior Messiah of Hebrew apocalyptic who will defeat the enemies of God in a bloody war of good against evil.
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Christianity also increasingly appropriated the philosophical theology of Plato and Aristotle, thereby linking the Christian Trinitarian God with metaphysical dualism. God is identified with mind over body, spirit over matter. This dualism of mind over body moved toward ascetic dualism, cultivated by a male monastic elite who focus on the inner intellectual spirit by denying the body and eschewing sex and reproduction. The earth and its physical life processes are seen as in a terminal state, soon to disappear for a purely spiritual life in heaven. The Christian is one who denies the flesh in order to become citizens of an otherworldly heaven which will supersede this earth and its corruptible and corrupting life processes. Having detailed briefly this history of God from the Canaanites to patristic Christianity, I will unpack the consequences of these ideas of God for women, for the earth and for other peoples and cultures; in other words, its androcentrism, anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, militarism and asceticism. The traditional Christian view of God is androcentric; that is, God is identified as a male, although remnants of a secondary female manifestation of God never fully disappear. This means that maleness is seen as more godlike than femaleness. Male-female duality is assimilated into the metaphysical dualism of mind and body. Femaleness is linked to sex, body and mortality and so alien to God who is sexless, disembodied and immortal. All males are not equally godlike, although any male is more godlike than any woman. But those males who are most godlike are the sex-denying males of the intellectual, ecclesial ruling class. This class is in rivalry with the political ruling class of Christian empire, whether of Rome or Byzantium, for whom patriarchal lineage is important. Only with difficulty do Christian priests grant a place for the Christian emperor or kings as representatives of God. Hierarchy is inherent in androcentrism; that is, God is not only a male, but the apex of the male ruling class, both ecclesial and political. Those ruled over by this godlike male ruling class; women, slaves, children, laity and subjects, stand in a secondary mediated relation to God, obeying God through their husbands, masters, fathers, priests and kings. This Christian view of God fosters ethnocentric imperialism. Christians are Gods new elect people who have a mission to convert the peoples of all other religions. This mission is identified with Christian empire or Christendom, whether the Christian Roman empire or its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Catholic empire, the British Protestant empire and today the American empire. These empires are seen as bearers of Gods redemptive true faith and way of life.
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Christian conquistadors and Christian missionaries went hand in hand to convert the heathen to Christianity and to establish the benevolent rule of the Spanish, the British or the Americans over lesser people who were in need of Christianizing and civilizing. This mission to Christianize and to civilize is seen as a redemptive mission. That is, when all people of the world are converted to the Christian empires faith and assimilated into its superior way of life (or else annihilated) the redemption of the world will be complete and the Kingdom of God will dawn in human history. The most recent representative of this Christian imperial messianic mission has been the United States of America. This idea of American empire has already been discredited. It no sooner peaked in blatant form under the former U.S. President George W. Bush, than it has been repudiated by the rest of the nations of the world and even by most Americans. Nevertheless, its roots are deep in American history. Americans absorbed from their British Puritan ancestors a belief in themselves as an elect nation chosen by God to embody the true faith and redeemed way of life ordered by obedience to Gods commandments. This self-understanding was reinterpreted by the founding fathers of the American Revolution which saw the new nation as the model for freedom and democracy which should be spread to all other nations, overcoming benighted forms of political order. This claim was always beset by contradictions in practice. Although claiming to represent the universal rights of man, these rights were denied for 150 years to all women. They were also denied to non-white people. African slaves were not included in the rights of man, and American Indians were both excluded from membership in the new nation and were eliminated by the triumphant Anglo-Saxon people of God destined to spread across the continent from sea to shining sea. Mexicans, inferior both as Catholics and mixed race people, were also to be pushed aside by this triumphant march across the continent, half of their country confiscated in the process. Various other immigrant groups were looked on with suspicion as not capable of becoming American. One of these was the Irish, questionable as Celts and Catholics, who were initially treated as less than fully human, although in due time the Irish in America succeeded in assimilating and becoming white, as did other immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, Jews and Italians. In the process the definition of whiteness expanded, leaving behind its limitation to AngloSaxon Protestants. But the capacity to melt in the American melting pot continued to have its uneasy limits, represented historically by the African and the Indian, but still today by the Mexican and now particularly by the Muslim. That Americans have succeeded in electDownloaded from http://fth.sagepub.com at CAPES on January 31, 2010

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ing a President with a Kenyan Muslim father and grandfather and an Indonesian Muslim stepfather, is a major breakthrough beyond these historical borders. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries the expanding American empire leapt the boundaries of the continent and conquered the remnants of the Spanish empire in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, as well as Guam and Hawaii. With other European empires, the U.S. set its eyes on China as well. The Caribbean and parts of the Pacific were designated as American turf, with continual military interventions to suppress independence movements in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. During the Cold War years of 19461990 the U.S. became the champion of godly Western civilization against godless communism. Anticommunism as a war for the American way of life against totalitarian communism became the American civil religion, justifying continual interventions in national liberation movements around the world, notably in Vietnam and throughout Latin America, to maintain U.S. hegemony. In the process the U.S. built an empire of economic and military dominance around the globe, present in American bases on every continent. With the collapse of the USSR the anti-communist crusade lost its original rationale, but the American military quickly constructed a new global enemy in militant Islam, represented especially in Iran. The collapse of the USSR was seen as the opportunity for the U.S. to shake off the limitations of multilateralism for unabashed American global dominance. The rise of militant Islam with its apocalyptic religious language reactivated an American Christian apocalyptic religious language that sees America as elected by God to save the world against the demonic powers of evil. George Bush as born-again Christian supported by militant evangelicals readily used the crusading language of the war of good against evil. Such messianic god-language identified with American military empire became explicit in the speeches made by American General William Boykin, a prominent military leader charged with the search for Osama bin Laden. In speeches to his conservative Christian constituency Boykin opined that America is an object of hate by other nations because it is uniquely a Christian nation. Boykin went on to say that our spiritual enemy can only be defeated when we confront them in the name of God. Muslims, he believes, worship an idol and not the true God. God had put George Bush in the White House at this critical moment in history. We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this. In other words, George Bush is Gods Messiah put in power to lead the apocalyptic war of Gods chosen people against the demonic powers
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in the last days. Here the ethnocentrism latent in Christian god-language finds expression in a theological rhetoric of American empire. Anthropocentrism construes the male ruling class human as Gods representative to rule over the rest of creation. Such humans are given unlimited dominion over the whole earth to use its resources as they will. For forty years environmentalists have warned us that the present form of development is threatening the viability of the human project within the ecosystems of the planet. But the right wing Christians of the sort that supported President Bush made ecology their bete noir, claiming that it is a form of paganism or nature worship and an apostasy to the true biblical message of divinely appointed human dominion over the earth. Even in the fading months of his administration President Bush backed away from taking any action on climate change. This hostility to ecology in the name of the human as Gods unique representative reflects the long standing hostility to the body and sexuality in the Christian tradition. Along with his militarist imperialism, George Bush positioned himself as the champion of heterosexual marriage against gays who might wish to sanctify their relationship. The policies of his administration stood four square against legalized abortion. Africans dying of AIDs by the millions were counseled to practice sexual abstinence to prevent the spread of the disease. Stem cells were treated with great reverence, not to be used to cure disease. Bush and his Christian right supporters absolutized the right to life between conception and birth, while disregarding it after birth. Here we see the strange fruit of that combination of ascetic fear of sex and militarist aggression rooted in a view of God as both puritanical and violent. How do we deconstruct these terrible consequences of a view of God through the lenses of androcentrism, anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, militarism and asceticism? It is not easy to turn these patterns around through the resources of the Christian tradition. I will briefly describe the problems of overcoming these patterns in the quest for an understanding of God that is truly inclusive of all life forms and expressive of their mutual flourishing. I will start with the problem of androcentrism, with God as the representative of the male ruling class over women. It may seem easy to include women in the image of God. One simply adds she to he and mother to father. One can also retrieve the remnants of female God language which have continued to exist in the Christian tradition, such as God as Wisdom. But the matter is more difficult. The rare appearance of the Wisdom tradition in Scripture and theology does use female imagery, but always as a secondary and derivative expression of a male God, one who mediates between the male God and creation. Wisdom is never fully God in herself.
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Elizabeth Johnson, in her book She Who Is, made a valiant effort to make Wisdom language central to the understanding of God in all three persons of the Trinity. She does this by feminizing the language for Father, Son and Spirit, but this masculine language still lurks in the background. As soon as the male imagery becomes explicit it tends to subordinate the female imagery as dependent and auxiliary, not genuinely interchangeable with male God language. Can we go beyond both gender hierarchy and gender complementarity and imagine the female as a representative of the whole? The effort to overcome class hierarchy in God language was undertaken in Latin American liberation theology that spoke of God as liberator of the poor and of Gods preferential option for the poor. But the idea of Gods preferential option for the poor was misinterpreted as a new doctrine of election. The poor became Gods favored people against the rich. What happens when a few of the poor become rich and powerful? Do the poor have to stay poor and victimized to remain Gods elect? What liberation theology intended was a call to dismantle polarized social systems which make most people poor so a few can be rich, which make most people powerless so a few can be powerful, to create societies where resources are equitably shared. A God who overcomes sexism and classism must also be a God for all nations, all peoples and cultures. But it is hard to untangle universalist monotheism from imperialism. The idea of the oneness of God is deeply entrenched in the idea of the election of one people and one religion, and the right of that one people and their religion to conquer all other people and to obliterate their cultures and religions. Rather than reaching for inclusivity, we should start by acknowledging the limitations of anyone religion and its ideas of God. Different religions point in different ways to divine mystery as the source of life and renewal of life. We need to affirm the divine in and through the many gods or even lack of gods, as in Buddhism, of diverse religious traditions, rather than trying to make the ideas of one religion universal by destroying other religious cultures. Finally, how can our view of God overcome the heritage of fear of the body, of sexuality and of finitude and embrace the whole creation as the embodiment of the divine? Can God become truly ecological? Can Christians overcome the idea fixe that we are the unique representatives of God and acknowledge that we are one species among others, latecomers to the planet? For most of the 4.5 billion years of emerging life on planet earth, humans did not exist. We have appeared only in the last 400,000 years (depending on where you count our differentiation from our simian ancestors) and we have become a dominant species only in the last 10,000 years, a mere half second in planetary
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history. The belief that God chose us to dominate the earth represents our usurpation of power over others, not a divine gift. This usurpation is becoming ever more toxic and death prone, threatening to un-create the earth. How can humans acknowledge that we are one species among others who can sustain our own life on earth only by fitting into the flourishing of the whole ecosystem of which we are an interdependent part? The conversion of our God language is an integral part of the conversion of the human mind to the earth, to sustainable living with our fellow forms of life. God must be seen as present in the diverse expressions of life on earth, rather than seeing humans as the unique image of God called to rule over the earth, even as we try to flee its finitude and limitations for an immortal life beyond the earth. God is manifest not just in humans, but in wolves and insects, trees and flowers, the waters that fall from the sky and waters that well up from the earth. The God language we need today must be ecofeminist, overcoming the domination of the (male ruling class) human over the earth. One effort to engage this radical re-imagining of God-language is the writings of Brazilian ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara. Gebara sees ecofeminism as the third stage of Latin American feminist theology, not just adding womans perspective or female imagery, but as dismantling the basic patriarchal paradigms of theology that have shaped all relationships in a hierarchical world view of heaven over earth, spirit over matter, mind over body, male over female, rulers over ruled. One example of her deconstruction and reconstruction of traditional theology is her re-visioning of the idea of God as Trinity. She asks, what is the human experience symbolized by the idea of God as Trinity? She suggests that this is a metaphorical expression of the dynamics of life as the creative process of differentiation, interrelation and communion. This life process exists on every level of reality; on the cosmic level, on the level of the earth as biosphere, on the level of plant and animal species, on the level of human races and cultures and finally on the inter- and intrapersonal levels. This triune process of diversification, interrelation and communion is the basis for ongoing creativity. Far from trying to reduce this diversity to one form that subdues all the others, life flourishes only though diversity. To reduce this diversity to monolithic oneness is a formula for ecological collapse, not healthy life. So the impulse of monotheistic, monarchical monocultural oneness is fundamentally contrary to creating and sustaining life. This means that the universe and God can only be universal by being a communion in diversity, not a reduction to singleness. This intercommunion in diversity must embrace and celebrate each expression of manyness, for only in affirming each expression can
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there be authentic interrelation and communion. Diversity becomes hostile to the promise of communion as soon as one form seeks to subjugate all the others to itself. Mutual affirmation of difference is the basis of communication and interrelation. This vision of God as Trinitarian communion in diversity has radical implications for our understanding of life-giving faith. It suggests that respect for religious diversity and deep dialogue between different cultural visions that have emerged in human history is intrinsic to authentic insight into the divine. Any effort to find God by eliminating the others is to silence the fullness of who God is and to shut down the life process. The urge to empire, the impulse to eliminate all others for one dominant religion, all cultures for one dominant culture, the many economies for one dominant economy, one race at the expense of many races, one gender at the expense of others, one way of being sexual and constructing family at the expense of others, is anti-life, and a denial of our being in God as that triune process in which we live and move and have our being. Much of patriarchal religion has been built on this kind of splitting and repression of the many by a dominant one, one kind of humans over other humans and over the other species of nature. A renewed God language and renewed life on earth has to dismantle these dominations and repressions and to affirm many ways of being alive, thereby opening up endless creative interconnections and syntheses. Only thus can creativity flourish and then we might have life abundantly.

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