In my first theology course at seminary, the professor invited us to participate in an exercise. He took an overhead projector and wrote on the left hand side of the screen the word, "God." On the right hand side of the screen he wrote the word, "Humanity." From there we all listed other dualisms we were familiar with. "light/dark, mind/body, rational/emotional, right/left, science/mysticism, active/passive, assertive/receptive, subject/object, good/bad" We really got into it. The dualisms were easy to list and we knew the correct order. At the very end, he took a transparency and laid it over our words. On the left hand side of the screen was the word, "male" and on the right hand side was the word "female." A shocking silence followed as we looked at the two lists: God, light, mind, rational, right, science, active, assertive, subject, good, male on one side and humanity, dark, body, emotional, left, mysticism, passive, receptive, object, bad, female on the other side. "This is what feminist theologians are critiquing--an ancient pattern of thought, almost unconscious, that identifies God with male and humanity with female and you can see what is and is not valued in our culture." That was my introduction to feminist theology and I've been reading and studying, debating and critiquing ever since.

For 30 years now, feminist theology has been an identifiable theological movement and has carved out a solid niche in theological conversations. Feminists have raised questions about conceptions of God, the person and work of Jesus Christ or Christology, anthropology, and language as it relates to theology and ethics. Within the Christian community, feminism has forced a re-evaluation of language in liturgy as well as patterns of power within society and the church.

Both secular feminism and feminist theology claim their roots in the 19th century Christian women's movement, vis a vis Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the abolitionist movement. However, it was during the ferment of the 1960's and its hostility towards traditional institutions like the church that questions were posed with unavoidable directness: are Christianity and Christian theology irredeemably sexist, or can Christian symbols and patterns be re-imagined and re-stated in ways that properly value women?

As secular feminism developed, three major schools of thought began to distinguish themselves.

Feminist theology shares these concerns with feminist thought, but must address a further dilemma as it seeks to reclaim the Christian tradition. On the one hand, the Bible itself contains themes of liberation that point to the movement of God as that of leading people from oppression into freedom, from injustice to justice. These themes resonate powerfully with feminist concerns.

Within theological feminism, a distinction is made between revolutionary and reformist feminists. Revolutionary feminists find the Christian tradition irredeemably patriarchal and oppressive. They look to other traditions or to new theologies.. (Theologians Mary Daly and Carol Christ come to mind--MM) Reformists recognize the liabilities and the potentialities of the Christian tradition, and seek to reformulate faith and practice. Rosemary Radford Ruether would be considered within the reformist camp.(as would Sallie McFague, Letty Russell, Delores Williams--MM)" (3) I read across both, but it is Rosemary that has personally kept me involved in the church, believing that transformation of faith and practice is happening.

Rosemary Radford Ruether is the Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. This summer I had the privilege of taking one of her classes at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and my understanding is that she will become a part of that faculty shortly. Although her background is pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic, she grew up with an open, expansive Catholicism nurtured by her mother (her father died when she was 12). Early on she was introduced to ecumenical and feminist concerns. Her family is Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, all of whom took religion as a "serious part of their identity and had commitments to social justice." Her mother's closest friend was one of the founders of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the 1920's. (4)

After some years of studying the history of post-Biblical Judaism and early Christianity in an effort to understand better the meaning of such key ideas as "redemption," she found herself working on a Ph.D. in religious studies. By that time (1960) she was married, had two children, and was becoming involved in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965 she spent a summer working in Mississippi with the Delta Ministry against apartheid. After her family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1966 she taught for ten years at a Black Theological seminary, the School of Religion at Howard University. There she was part of the beginnings of Black theology, as well as of feminist theology.

One of Ruether's contributions to theology has been her dialectical methodology with the poles of tradition and contemporary experience held in creative tension. It means her work is always in process, continually changing and challenging and refining as new insights emerge. This kind of dialectical thinking also allows the experiences of repressed persons and communities to speak and be heard. Having identified an evil or injustice, Ruether explores the meaning of that which is being oppressed, and either by finding neglected resources within the tradition or critically reformulating the tradition, she encourages a new understanding of the topic. Her tireless historical research, whether she is reading the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the texts from traditions deemed "heretical" by traditional Christianity like the Gospel of Thomas or of Mary, religious and philosophical ideas from non-Christian, Near Eastern, and Greco-Roman worlds, or critical post-Christian reflections such as that provided by liberalism, romanticism, and Marxism--enables her to find crucial responses to questions some women raise about whether Christianity can take women seriously.

For instance, in one of her most recent books, Women and Redemption: A Theological History, Ruether asks the question, "Are women redeemed by Christ?" (5) She explores the notion of redemptive gender relations by first, tracing the Biblical tradition, which she maintains is conflicted. On the one hand, we have the acts of Jesus towards women, encouraging them, treating them as equal disciples, his inaugural sermon in which he announces he has come to bring good news to the poor, the liberation of captives and the setting at liberty of those who are oppressed. Jesus turns the social system upside down.

On the other hand, we have Paul citing an early baptismal creed, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female in Christ." But for Paul that phrase takes on a particular meaning. It has become linked to celibacy. Women are seen as becoming spiritual equals with men by giving up their female functions as wives, renouncing sex and procreation, and becoming "spiritually male."

As women in these early congregations claimed a new freedom to preach and travel as evangelists, while renouncing marriage and family, even this limited idea of gender equality became too threatening to Paul and his successors. Later writers in the New Testament would insist that equality in Christ is only spiritual. It does not change the actual power of masters, husbands and fathers over slaves, wives and children. Rather they are commanded to obey.

From the Biblical tradition, Ruether examines the historical practices of the early church for clues. The second to the fourth centuries saw a gradual suppression of these more radical understandings of Christianity in regard to women's roles. Christians with views that women could be leaders, could speak in the churches, were declared heretical and expelled from churches increasingly dominated by male clergy, who modeled themselves after the patriarchal rule of families and the governors of Roman cities and provinces. The bishop of Rome would come to see himself as spiritual heir of the Roman emperor and as supreme ruler of the church.

But Ruether's excellent scholarship finds alternative historical voices within Christian practice. The Quakers in the 17th century affirmed a complete original equality in the image of God and condemned woman's subordination as sinful domination. During the 17-19th centuries, the focus of redemptive hope shifted from an other worldly view of redemption in which salvation is completed after death to a this worldly view in which unjust relationships of tyranny, war, poverty would all be transformed on earth into a just and livable future through human responsibility. Feminist theology developed within this latter modern view and so concentrates on the here and now of relationships with an deep emphasis on taking responsibility.

From Biblical tradition to historical sources, Ruether now takes on Christology. Rejecting the classical notion that the human soul is radically fallen, alienated from God, and unable to make any move to reconcile itself with God, therefore needing an outside mediator to do the work of reconciliation for us, Ruether defines the human self through its primary identity as image of God. This original goodness and communion with its divine ground of being continue to be our true nature. Evil is defined as those structures which victimize others. We become alienated from our true potential but experiences of consciousness raising, starting with the experiences of the most disprivileged among us, convert us back to our true selves and enable us to reconstruct personal and social relations. Ruether suggests that an external redeemer is not needed, since we have not lost our true selves rooted in God. But grace events of loving outreach from others and shocks of rampant evil put us in touch with our authentic selves and set us on the path of struggle for just and loving relations.

The role of Jesus becomes different in feminist theology, mainly because Jesus' maleness has been used against women to say that we can not represent Christ. The maleness of Jesus is the basis for the Vatican's refusal to ordain women in the Catholic church. It is at the heart of the debate within the Southern Baptist Convention to rescind the ordination of women. I suspect it is also one of the reasons why from time to time Protestants, and yes, even some United Methodists, still question why women should be ordained. (7) To which, Ruether and other feminist theologians would say, Jesus maleness isn't the issue--it is the "quality of Jesus' humanness as one who loves others and opts for those most vulnerable and oppressed, namely women. One imitates Christ, by living in like manner, not by possessing male genitalia."(8) Jesus' story is a root story for the redemptive process in which we all must be engaged, but he does not and cannot do it for us. Jesus' life models for us what we need to do--reject religious and social systems of domination that say the poor don't matter, that women don't matter, that the despised don't matter.

But even this still leaves the emphasis on women as recipients of Jesus' liberative acts, not as liberative agents for themselves or others. Something more is needed. "Christian feminist theology is pushed to go beyond the telling of the Jesus story as that of a good man who really cared about us, and dare to parallel the Jesus story with the story of women who acted as liberators." (9)

Can anyone here think of a story of a woman who has acted as a liberator? I can't emphasize enough how crucial I think this step really is. Let that be a challenge to all of us to do so. For when we can name and celebrate these women, we recognize their leadership, their capacity to discern where God is moving, their abilities to act as agents of change in their own right, their likeness to God. They can represent the sort of human we would like to be. We make them visible and alive. Perhaps Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on that bus so long ago. Or Delores Huerta as she voiced the farm workers' concerns to the public and fought for their rights. Or perhaps Sadako, the Japanese girl who felt the effects of radiation when the bomb exploded near her Nagasaki home and who vowed to make 1000 paper cranes that would bring peace around the world. Perhaps even Mary, the young Jewish girl who agrees to become pregnant for hope as Jesus Christ to come into the world could be seen as liberator.

A story....May, 1993 saw 2500 people, mainly women but 200 of whom were men, gather in Minneapolis for the first ever Re-Imagining Conference in which topics like salvation, church, faith, redemption, sin, and others would be discussed predominantly from a women's experience perspective. Women theologians, most of whom were feminists, were invited to reflect, celebrate the Eucharist, dream aloud a new way of theologizing. Scarcely a week after the conference ended, it was touted as a pagan gathering, subverting the message of the Gospel, leading good Christian women astray. I've still got the newspaper articles in my file cabinet that denounced it. At least one national staff member lost her job over it all. But to many who were there, it was like a breath of fresh air...Women leading women...women academicians expressing themselves freely, God pulling the curtains back to see the beauty of a new day. But that new day of women thinking for themselves, expressing themselves in a different theological language, celebrating El Shaddai, the breasted One, or Sophia, the Wise One, both names in the Bible, threatened some folk. . Change always does.

In C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, in which English children are whisked away by magic into another world where they depose an evil witch, become kings and queens, and rule over the now freed friendly talking beasts that populate Narnia, Aslan the Lion, makes an inclusive statement that affects one of the other lions and causes him to react:

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(1) Bouma, Rolf, Modern Western Theology Dictionary II, 1996-1997. I am indebted to Mr. Bouma for his analysis of the emergence of feminist thought and its major schools of theory and his thumbnail sketch of early feminist theologies. Thank you.

(2) Bouma, Rolf, ibid.

(3) Bouma, Rolf, ibid.

(4) Ruether, Rosemary, Bridging the Gap, Boston Review, 1993-2000.

(5) Ruether, Rosemary, Women and Redemption: A Theological History, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1998.

(6) Ruether, Rosemary, Women and Roman Catholic Christianity, Catholics for a Free Choice, 2000.

(7) At a Quest for Quality weekend (1998) in which 400 of us as participants were asked to say what we saw as problems within our annual conference, I watched the overhead say distinctly 3 times, "Ordaining women as clergy"

(8) Ruether, Redemption, ibid.

(9) Ruether, Redemption, ibid.

(10) McLaughlin, Eleanor, "Feminist Christologies: Re-Dressing the Tradition," in Maryanne Stevens, ed., Reconstructing the Christ Symbol: Essays in Feminist Christology. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1993.