We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
‘What is Woman that thou art mindful of her, or the Daughter of Woman that thou dost care for her?’ The question posed by this revision of Psalm 8:4 has troubled feminist theological scholarship in myriad ways over the last thirty years. To be sure, even within non-theological feminist scholarship, the question of what defines ‘womanhood’, how woman is biologically, socio-culturally, emotionally and spiritually constituted, has been explicitly addressed and hotly debated. In theological feminist scholarship, the question has often remained underground and implicit but nevertheless central. In regard to this question's specific relation to the doctrine of sin, the debate has had a complex history in feminist theological scholarship. It will be argued, after the history of the debate has been sketched, that the terms of the debate have been limited from the outset by a reaction to one stream of Protestant thought. The debate itself is therefore theologically thin, and in need of further fleshing out. It will be the thesis of this essay that the theological inadequacies of the feminist debate over the nature of women's sin in effect undercut the intentions of feminist scholarship to heal the wounds inflicted by sexism, and that a hamartiology such as that found in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics may promise a way beyond the impasse.
2 Goldstein, Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View”, Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The author now uses the name Saiving.
3 Saiving, p 108.
4 Plaskow, Judith, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980) vii.Google Scholar
5 Plaskow, p 3.
6 Plaskow, p 3.
7 Thistlethwaite, Susan, Sex, Race and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White (New York: Crossroad, 1989): 77–79.Google Scholar
8 This has been but a brief review of the debate. For further reading, see Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1985)Google Scholar; Grey, Mary, “Falling into Freedom: Searching for New Interpretations of Sin in a Secular Society”, Scottish Journal of Theology 47 (1994): 223–243CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fulkerson, Mary McClintock, “Sexism as Original Sin”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1991): 653–675CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Christine, “Sin and Evil in Feminist Thought”, Theology Today 50 (1993): 208–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Delores, “Sin, Nature and Black Women's Bodies” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Adams, Carol J. (New York: Continuum, 1993) pp 24–29Google Scholar, and “A Womanist Perspective on Sin” in A Troubling in My Soul, ed. Townes, Emilie M. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) pp 130–149.Google Scholar
9 Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).Google Scholar
10 Engel, Mary Potter, “Evil, Sin, and the Violation of the Vulnerable” in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Theologies From the Underside, ed. Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks and Engel, Mary Potter (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990) p 155.Google Scholar
11 Fulkerson, Mary McClintock, “Sexism as Original Sin: Developing a Theacentric Discourse”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1991): 653–675CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father.
12 See, e.g., Andrews's, Louie Adeline unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Sin With a Feminine Flair: Failing to Self-Actualize”, Florida State University, 1985Google Scholar; Carr, Ann E., Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition in Women's Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988)Google Scholar; Sue Dunfee, ‘The Sin of Hiding: A Feminist Critique of Reinhold Niebuhr's Account of the Sin of Pride”, Soundings Fall 1982: 316–27; Heyward, Carter, “Is a Self-Respecting Christian Woman an Oxymoron?” in Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966): 77Google Scholar; Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986)Google Scholar; McReynolds, Sally Ann and Graff, Ann O'Hara, “Sin: When Women Are the Context” in In the Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology ed. Graff, Ann O'Hara (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995) pp 161–172Google Scholar; Russell, Letty, Human Liberation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974) p 113Google Scholar; Williams, Dolores, “A Womanist Perspective on Sin”, in A Troubling in my Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Townes, Emilie (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) pp 130–149Google Scholar. For a treatment which acknowledges that sin was not always defined traditionally as pride alone, see Berry, Wanda, “Images of Sin and Salvation in Feminist Theology”, ATR 60 (1978): 25–54.Google Scholar
13 Sue Dunfee, “The Sin of Hiding”; Dolores Williams, “A Womanist Perspective on Sin”.
14 Biblical feminism”, alternatively known as “Christian feminism”, is generally an evangelical strand of feminist Christian scholarship which, unlike feminist theology per se, does not generally seek to reconstruct key Christian doctrines. See Storkey, Elaine, What's Right With Feminism? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986)Google Scholar; Hagen, June Steffensen, Gender Matters: Woman's Studies for the Christian Community (Grand Rapids: Academie Zondervan, 1990)Google Scholar; Spencer, Aida Besançon, Beyond the Curse (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1985)Google Scholar and The Goddess Revival (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1995)Google Scholar; Van Leeuwen, Mary Stewart, After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).Google Scholar
15 “Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity… Constructionism (the position that differences are constructed, not innate) really operates as a more sophisticated form of essentialism.” Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989) pp xi–xii.Google Scholar
16 See, e.g., Riley, Denise, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).Google Scholar
17 Tanner, Kathryn, “Respect for Other Religions: A Christian Antidote to Colonialist Discourse” Modern Theology 9 (1993): 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 For critiques and refinements of the notion of “experience” as theological norm, see Allik, Tiina, “Human Finitude and the Concept of Women's Experience”, Modern Theology 9 (1993): 67–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davaney, Sheila Greeve, “The Limits of the Appeal to Women's Experience”, Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, eds. Atkinson, Clarissa W., Buchanan, Constance, and Miles, Margaret, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987): 31–49Google Scholar and “Problems with Feminist Theory: Historicity and the Search for Sure Foundations” in Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values, ed. Cooey, Paula et aliae (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987): 79–95Google Scholar; Schner, George, “The Appeal to Experience” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 40–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; West, Angela, Deadly Innocence: Feminist Theology and the Mythology of Sin (London: Cassels, 1995).Google Scholar
19 Angela West, Deadly Innocence, 146.
20 Of course, not all feminist theologians engage in such complete reshaping of the web of belief. One such example is Sarah Coakley, who in a recent essay on Kenosis shows the “fit” between classical Christian theology and the norms and goals of feminism: “…the rhetoric of kenosis has not simply constituted the all-too-familiar exhortation to women to submit to lives of self-destructive subordination; nor (as Hampson believes) can it be discarded solely as a compensatory reaction to the ‘male problem’. The evocations of the term have been much more complex and confusing even than that; just as the Christian tradition is in so many respects complex, confusing and (as I believe), continually creative…My aim here is to show how wordless prayer can enable one, paradoxically, to hold vulnerability and personal empowerment together, precisely by creating the ‘space’ in which non-coercive divine power manifests itself, and I take this to be crucial for my understanding of a specifically Christian form of feminism.” See her “Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing”, Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Hampson, Daphne (London: SPCK 1996) pp 83–84.Google Scholar
21 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics 4.2, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958): 381.Google Scholar
22 CD 4.2: 399.
23 So Sanders, E. P. has observed regarding Pauline theology in Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).Google Scholar
24 CD 4.2: 401.
25 CD 4.2: 400.
26 See CD 4.2: 404–5, 412, 432, 452, 468, 482–3, 494.
27 CD 4.2: 539.
28 See Gloege, Gerhard, “Zur Versōhnungslehre Karl Barths”, Theologische Literaturzeitung 3 (1960): 162–186Google Scholar; Hartwell, Herbert, The Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964)Google Scholar: 19. Notice that for Barth there is no discrete treatment of the doctrine of sin; rather, hamartiology falls under the larger rubric of reconciliation.
29 CD 4.2: 407.
30 CD 4.2: 408.
31 CD 4.2: 600–613.
32 Still, it must also be said that Barth is no misogynist. Even in his infamous discussion of 1 Corinthians 11 and the “ordering” of man and woman, he says: “The exploitation of this order by man, in consequence of which he exalts himself over woman, making himself her lord and master and humiliating and offending her so that she inevitably finds herself oppressed and injured, has nothing to do whatever with divine order. It is understandable that woman should protest and rebel against this exploitation, although she ought to realise at once that here as elsewhere protesting and rebelling are one thing and the way from disorder to order quite another.” (CD3.4, 170).
33 Angela West makes a similar point in her Deadly Innocence.
