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A Patrimony of Idols: Second-Wave Jewish and Christian Feminist Theology and the Criticism of Religion

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Abstract

This article suggests that second-wave feminist theology between around 1968 and 1995 undertook the quintessentially religious and task of theology, which is to break its own idols. Idoloclasm was the dynamic of Jewish and Christian feminist theological reformism and the means by which to clear a way back into its own tradition. Idoloclasm brought together an inter-religious coalition of feminists who believed that idolatry is not one of the pitfalls of patriarchy but its symptom and cause, not a subspecies of sin but the primary sin of alienated relationship. The first moment of feminist theology’s criticism of patriarchal power is not that it is socially unjust, but that it has licence to be unjust because it is idolatrous. Yet, neither opponents of feminist theology who dismiss it on the grounds that it is a secular import into the tradition, nor feminist students of theology and religion, have paid sufficient attention to feminist theology’s counter-idolatrous turn as the religious ground of women’s liberation. Here, the freedom and becoming of women is dependent on the liberation of the religious imagination from captivity to a trinity of idols: the patriarchal god called God who is no more than an inference from the political dispensation that created him; the idol of the masculine that created God in his own image and the idol of the feminine worshipped as an ideational object of desire only as the subordinated complement of the masculine and as a false image that becomes a substitute for the real, finite women whose agency and will it supplants.

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Notes

  1. Rosemary Radford-Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, p. 53.

  2. See, e.g. John B. Cobb, ‘God and Feminism’, in J. B. Cobb and David Tracy (ed.), Talking about God, New York: Seabury, 1983 p. 79. In 1967, without contesting classical Jewish monotheism, Raphael Patai, in The Hebrew Goddess, Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State University Press, 1990, had noted the centrality of female divine hypostases within the history of Jewish religious experience.

  3. Eleanor McLoughlin, ‘Feminist Christologies: Re-Dressing the Tradition’, in Maryanne Stevens, ed., Reconstructing the Christ Symbol: Essays in Christology, Paulist Press, 1993, pp. 118–149, p. 140.

  4. The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper & Row, 1957, pp. 29–30. After Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion had all expressed influential concerns about the human tendency to create God in our own image. Jean-Luc Marion regards the God of ontotheology as an idol—a mirror to ourselves in which we see not God’s face but our own (The Idol and Distance, Five Studies, New York: Fordham University Press, 2001, p. 18); ‘man’ is the original model of his own idol (God Without Being, University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 9–10, 16). See further, Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry, Madison, WI: Intervarsity Press, 2002; Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Cf., Georg Lukács History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans Rodney Livingstone, London, The Merlin Press 1971, [1923], pp. 83–110, where knowledge is not a ‘reflection’ of an external reality to be known as an object of pure cognition. Bourgeois ideology mystifies and realizes its own self-interest and projects its false consciousness on the proletariat by its reification or conversion of an abstract idea into a concrete and apparently timeless and natural model of human relations.

  5. ‘Feminist Hermeneutics, Scriptural Authority, and Religious Experience: The Case of the Imago Dei and Gender Equality’, in Werner G. Jeanrond and Jennifer L. Rilke (eds.) Radical Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion, New York: Crossroad, 1991, 95–106, p. 103.

  6. ‘Renewal or New Creation? Feminist Spirituality and Historical Religion’, in S. Gunew (ed) A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1991 [1986], p. 298.

  7. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, pp. 181. See also pp. 180–183 and passim.

  8. Beyond God the Father, London: The Women’s Press, 1973, p. 29.

  9. Beyond God the Father, p. 19.

  10. Beyond God the Father, p. 29.

  11. Beyond God the Father, p. 31. When the later Daly broke with reformism, she increasingly feminised Nietzsche’s criticism of monotheism as a nihilistic vitiation of natural energy by urging women to reclaim the divine energy manifest in the sacrality of sisterhood itself.

  12. Beyond God the Father, pp. 34–35.

  13. ‘The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female’, Theological Studies 45 (1984), pp. 441–465. This article would later be expanded into She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, New York, Crossroad, 1992.

  14. Johnson, ‘The Incomprehensibility of God’, pp. 443–5. Cf. Virginia Mollenkott, The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female, NY: Crossroad, 1983.

  15. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 147–8. Plaskow’s more recent notion of a transgendered God is also continuous with her earlier Jewish feminist theology as a correction of idolatry (See Lecture 3 of her Sherman Lectures, ‘The Sexuality of God’, given at the University of Manchester, 2000). Other Jewish feminist theologians contemporary with Plaskow such as Tikva Frymer-Kensky refused fixity within our idea of the unity of God by adverting, for example, to the Hebrew Bible’s succession of non-static images for God running from a rock and father through to a mother eagle, birth-giver and warrior in ‘On Feminine God-Talk, The Reconstructionist 59 (1994), 48–55. Marcia Falk, in ‘Toward a Feminist Jewish Reconstruction of Monotheism’ Tikkun Magazine: a Bi-monthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, 4 (1989): 53–6 and The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) similarly expressed her counter-idolatrous sense of the unstable, permeable, dispersive boundaries of the human, natural and the divine through the composition of new prayers and new translations of traditional texts.

  16. See Ellen Umansky’s contribution to Carol P. Christ, Ellen M. Umansky and Anne E. Carr, ‘Roundtable Discussion: What Are the Sources of My Theology? Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 1 (1985), pp. 119–131, 124.

  17. ‘The Hebrew God and His Female Complements’, in J. Martin Soskice and D. Lipton (ed.), Feminism and Theology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 156, 155–174.

  18. Viktoria Lee Erikson made a Durkheimian split between women as practitioners of religion and the possibility of a feminist spirituality: ‘feminist sociology of religion might do well to make a distinction between religion which is created by masculine forces and spirituality which is the life experience of women and other excluded people who are offered only a socially constructed ‘god’ in place of a ‘God’ beyond the socially produced ‘god’. ‘Back to the Basics: Feminist Social Theory, Durkheim and Religion’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 8 (1992), p. 46, pp. 35–46.

  19. Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, esp. pp. 29–30, 33, 36, 38.

  20. ‘Notes Towards Finding the Right Question’, in Susannah Heschel (ed.), On Being a Jewish Feminist, pp. 121–2, 120–151. It should, however, be noted that Ozick, always hyper-sensitive to the possibility of idolatry, considered even her own literary inventions to be, by their nature, at risk of descending into such. See ‘The Riddle of the Ordinary’, Moment 2, 1983, pp. 55–59.

  21. Emergent tensions between reformist theologians and radical thealogians are alluded to in the editors’ preface to Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (ed.), Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, New York: HarperSanFrancsico, 1989, p. v, v–vii.

  22. During the 1980s, brief but explicit feminist theological charges of idolatry against Christianity and Judaism included those by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, pp. 22–27, 66–67, also her ‘The Female Nature of God,’ God as Father? (Concilium 143; New York: Seabury, 1981), p. 66; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Feminist Spirituality, Christian Identity, and Catholic Vision’, in C. Christ and J. Plaskow ed., Womanspirit Rising, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979, p. 139; Rita Gross, ‘Female God Language in a Jewish Context’, ibid. 169–70; Anne Carr, ‘Is a Christian Feminist Theology Possible?’ Theological Studies 43 (1982), p. 296, 279–297, and Mary Ann Stenger, ‘Male Over Female or Female Over Male: A Critique of Idolatry’, Soundings, 4 (Winter, 1986), pp. 464–478.

  23. ‘The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation’, in Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, New York: Cosmino, 2005 [1910], 219–232.

  24. John T. McNeill (ed), Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, Louisville, Kentucky, Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, p. 108.

  25. Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980.

  26. Like other theologians writing during and after the Second World War against one of the most self-glorifying regimes the world has ever seen, Niebuhr’s account of idolatry as the originary sin in which ‘man’s’ ‘vain imagination’ gives a relative and contingent reality the appearance of an unconditioned one naturally lent itself to the feminist project. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man. Volume 1: Human Nature?, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997 [1941], pp. 178, 137–8.

  27. See “Male Theology and Women’s Experience” 1978, republished in J. Plaskow and D. Berman (ed.), The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism and Sexual Ethics 1972–2003, Boston: The Beacon Press, 2005, pp. 40–55.

  28. Sex, Sin and Grace, p. 67.

  29. See Sanhedrin 93a. Maimonides knows that all 613 commandments are a means to fulfil the first two—affirmation of the existence of God who is unlike anything in the created order and the rejection of idolatry—the other 611 existing only to support a physical and intellectual environment conducive to monotheism (Guide of the Perplexed, 3.27–28).

  30. The imperial machismo of the insignia used on Roman and then Nazi banners—especially the eagle and portraits of its respective emperor-gods—are repugnant to Jews on both cultic and historical grounds.

  31. Guide of the Perplexed, 1.56–57.

  32. No Other Gods: The Modern Struggle Against Idolatry, West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1995, p. 20.

  33. Modern Jewish thinking on idolatry is of broader philosophical relevance than the traditional Orthodox halakhic (legal) view of idolatry found in the Mishnah, Talmud and other rabbinic texts where idolatry is represented as a set of permissive socio-cultural practices from which Jews should set themselves apart.

  34. Sexism and God-Talk, p. 66.

  35. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1919], pp. 49–50, 96. See also Serene Jones, ‘This God Which Is Not One: Irigaray and Barth on the Divine’, in C. W. Maggie Kim, Susan M. St Ville, and Susan Simonaitis (eds.), Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, 109–141, pp. 129–30, on the theological confluences in Barth and Irigaray’s attempt to ‘jam’ liberal discourses that elide the difference between the human and the divine.

  36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 1, iii, 135.

  37. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, p. 32.

  38. The Second Sex, Harmondsworth, Middx., Penguin, 1972, pp. 104–5.

  39. New York: Dell, 1974.

  40. The Second Sex, p. 611.

  41. The Second Sex, p. 651.

  42. Wickedary, p. 232.

  43. The Essence of Christianity, p. 26.

  44. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Farah Straus Geroux, 2003 [1970] Cf. The Second Sex, p. 201.

  45. See also Anja Meulenbelt, For Ourselves: Our Bodies and Sexuality from Women’s Point of View, trans. Ann Oosthuizen and Marij van Helmond, London, Sheba Feminist Publications, 1981, esp. pp 46–8 and 72–8, which supply numerous photographs of genital and bodily differences among women of all ages.

  46. Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London: The Women’s Press, 1981, pp. 103–109. On the patriarchal feminine as the essence of ‘woman’, see Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, pp. 15–37. Queer theology would later move to prevent the idolatry of gender through its attack on essentialist models of gender that fix or fetishise particular attributes and qualities as the necessary, normative, defining attributes and qualities of a biological sex.

  47. Mary Daly and Jane Caputi, First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1987, pp. 198 and 232.

  48. Cf., de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 373.

  49. In God Without Being, Jean-Luc Marion famously distinguishes idols from icons on the grounds that the former are no more than the opaque objects of the gaze.

  50. ‘Die sich selbst verdoppelnde Frau’ was first published in English as ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, in Gisela Ecker (ed.), Feminist Aesthetics, London: The Women’s Press p. 56, 51–58. It was no coincidence that the epigraph to Christine Battersby’s feminist philosophical study of female selfhood, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998, cited Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53: ‘What is your substance, whereof are you made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend?’

  51. Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, pp. 56–7.

  52. The Second Sex, pp. 228–9.

  53. Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, pp. 52–3. Thealogians were especially enthusiastic in the replacement of feminine idols by populating the feminist imaginary with new female supernatural creatures and monsters. See my Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality, pp, 183–219; Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Santa Fe: Bear and Co., 1993.

  54. Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, p. 54.

  55. Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, p. 57. It is possible that Firestone’s battle with schizophrenia was triggered by the struggle to destroy a normative idol of femininity that had set up a competing and irreconcilable duality or split within her own consciousness.

  56. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 18; Daly, Church and the Second Sex, pp. 186–70, 150

  57. The publication of Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson’s Women and Religion: The Original Sourcebook of Women in Christian Thought, New York: HarperCollins, in 1977, followed in 1993 by Serenity Young’s similar compilation of generally misogynistic texts from a range of the world’s religious traditions (An Anthology of Sacred Texts By and About Women, London: Pandora) made these and other gendered dualisms of the religious ‘eternal feminine’ well-known.

  58. Sarah Nicholson, p. 20. ‘Neither God nor Goddess: Why Women Need an Archetype of the Self’, Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 7 (2012) 19–29.

  59. Rosemary Ruether, ‘The Liberation of Christology from Patriarchy’ in New Blackfriars, 66, 1985, p. 326, 324–335. See Edmund Hill’s response to her article in the same volume, p. 503. Ruether’s reply to him was published in New Blackfriars, 67, 1986, p. 92–93.

  60. ‘Notes Towards Finding the Right Question’, pp. 146–150.

  61. Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 135.

  62. The (i)dollification of women has only intensified since the introduction of digitally manipulated images and the growth of mass access to surgical and non-surgical cosmetic alteration of the human appearance since the end of the twentieth century. See Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, London: Virago, 2010; Melissa Raphael, ‘Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and the Prophetic Criticism of the Cosmetically and Technologically Perfected Female Face in Contemporary Popular Culture’, in The International Journal of Public Theology, 7 (2013), pp. 135–156. Women may have idolised men in possession of physical, economic and political power, but they have not had the power to trifle with them as mere objects of desire, other than when unusually physically or economically desirable women are permitted to do so in the short pre-matrimonial period of ritual courtship.

  63. Compare Roger Scruton, Modern Culture, Continuum: New York and London, 1998, pp. 55–67, where Scruton rightly describes the pornographic model as ‘an imaginary object which leaves nothing to the imagination’. Like a waxwork, she is ‘absolutely life-like and absolutely dead’. Not real or vulnerable, ‘my wanting and her doing are one and the same’ (p. 58).

  64. Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, trans. Stephen Muecke, Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, Occasional Papers 8, p. 4 and passim; Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Irigaray and the Divine’, in Kim et al. (eds), Transfigurations, pp. 207–8, 212, 199–214

  65. Speculum, p. 229

  66. Beyond God the Father, pp. 33–40

  67. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 26. That, by feminism’s third wave, after the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, women believed themselves to have taken command of their identity as women by its plural, fluid performance in multiple spaces, was a direct result of the second wave’s breaking of the fixed, essentialist, idols of super-human masculinity and sub-human femininity.

  68. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology, Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2003, p. 151

  69. Catherine Keller, ‘The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 4 (2008), pp. 905–933

  70. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, London: SCM, 1983, pp. 167, 145–192

  71. Ibid., 174–6

  72. ‘The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female’, p. 443. See further, ‘The Unknown God’ in M. Kehl and W. Löser (ed.), The von Balthasar Reader (New York: Crossroad, 1982) p. 184.

  73. Sexism and God-Talk, p. 67

  74. ‘Feminism and Pluralism in Contemporary Theology’, www.erudit.org/revue/LTP/1990/v46/n3/400553ar.pdf

  75. ‘The Hebrew God and His Female Complements’, p. 172, 155–174

  76. New York, Washington Square Press, 1983, p. 179

  77. See further, Johnson, ‘The Incomprehensibility of God’, p. 461.

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    Melissa Raphael

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Raphael, M. A Patrimony of Idols: Second-Wave Jewish and Christian Feminist Theology and the Criticism of Religion. SOPHIA 53, 241–259 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0409-1

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