Response to: The Risks of Repeating Ourselves: Reading Feminist, Womanist Figures of Jesus. By Karen Timble Alliaume

Over the past year and a half of my final time studying for my undergraduate degree, I have begun to question more specifically God’s use of women in occupational roles/positions. We have in the past gender-specified certain occupations, tasks, etc… and with the occupation I find myself identifying seems to fall into that predominantly male category of collegiate teaching, and in the even more forbidden territory of religious education. I want to teach theology and philosophy on a collegiate level, and involving God in that already-bold ambition of teaching young men has been questioned. What would I give up to teach? The conservative feminine ideal: husband and family (at least for now) because of an almost fanatical, over-ambitious drive at teaching. Probably far too intense, but I love the stuff I study… I converse with authors far too regularly, and am learning how to integrate what I learn into life. Jesus and I have a simple relationship that grows more complex as I experience more… as Jesus matures me into a woman He has married rather than a little girl He may be fond of. He wants me to be able to love Him back just as much as He loves me… and I struggle with that, because somewhere in the picture, that means being like my Jesus. Be like You, Jesus? But You are not a woman, I am not a man, how can I fully live like You? Thus I explore the feminist concepts of Jesus to see how far I can push into “men’s world” and remain a true woman in Your image.

Because these women are feminists that I am reading to obtain one polar perspective on women and Jesus, I have to keep in mind that part of their fundamental belief system defies patriarchal anything; any system that is organized with a man as head of a woman. Feminists in their true form, I think, dwell far too much in the past, assigning blame to men for the suppression of women. And of course, there is plenty of blame to be had there, in the past… but the more I read, the more I am think the feminists are playing the Eden game again… tag, men are “it” for the blame! The more I read, the more I am inspired and my imagination runs wild… but I think feminism need to realize the fundamental stupidity of women. “Maleness” has a bad taste in the mouths of feminists who see manhood as the cause of female oppression, omitting the female sin tendency to over-submit. “Your desire shall be for your husband and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3.16) evidences an innate female sin tendency to voluntarily subject herself to the whims and desires of others.

I think feminism denies something inherently female in our nature.. the sin tendencies: it acknowledges difference between make and female, but those difference remain unclear as feminists try to achieve “equality” for women. But equality of value does not necessarily imply same/like position, which feminism wants to attain: same roles and value. I think we women often forget our own nature, and do look to male nature as the “norm” for how we should be… though even in reality, we cannot make our natures anymore male than they can make theirs female. We are incapable, most of us, of performing “male-ly” in most given tasks because not only are my not built as men physiologically, we are not metaphysically built as men either.

This I find myself identifying with Alliaume,“McLaughlin’s own yearning for the answer to her question ‘How can I a woman, find myself, see myself as made in the image of a male God, a God whose human face is seen in the man Jesus?’ (140)” But the more preposterous solution cannot be so simple as McLaughlin proposes: “to ‘re-dress’ the problem of Jesus’ maleness by reading him as a transvestite, as one who shatters the opposed duality of male/female.” Jesus really did more than dress-up in flesh, though… He took on human nature (hypostatic union theology?). This proposition seems to have been given in response to Jesus’ apparently unmasculine behavior: “Jesus’ behavior is anxiety-provoking; he behaves in a manner inconsistent with our expectations of him as a man.” When did we ever assign gender to behavior? I guess Jesus’ avoidance of a gender-stereotype label makes Him frustrating to identify with. Why can we not just accept Jesus for who He tells us He is? Who He demonstrates to us He is? Why must we identify what He is to identify ourselves with Him? I think Jesus tried to picture humanity rather than a gender.

I guess we “dress” Jesus with gender-specific qualities so as to know how to emotionally engage Him. Do I want to emotionally engage Jesus like Alliaume? Is it a choice I have or something I just do, especially as a woman? Emotionally identify with Jesus? Jesus, do you feel as I feel, are you broken like me? Do I not engage emotions, distance myself from them because I don’t see You in them? All of me to all of You Jesus, please.  Alliaume points out an interesting confliction in how we view Jesus: “Christians believe in a Jesus ‘dressed’ in flesh, that most female of symbols, and they believe in a God in man-flesh who behaves like a woman.” I wondered at first how flesh was a female symbol, but if it is thought of in terms of Greek thought… separating us from the forms, true stuff, spirit, then flesh is evil, which would further explain to me that imputation of sin/guilt of all humanity onto women. (I tangent in my thought to make note to try and find the origin of existential guilt, since its presence is undeniable) We cannot make Jesus into a woman… but can we make a woman into Jesus? Can one be done but not the other? This “transvestite Jesus” is McLaughlin’s christologically playful attempt to shock her congregation, is seems.

“McLaughlin’s yearning, and mine (so speaks Alliaume), to see ourselves made in the image of a male God is a yearning to be recognized, as women, as capable of representing divinity; a recognition that is not made available to us in the conventional manner.” I need to find a way to convince/persuade women that they need to do this. That we women need to identify with Jesus, our living sacrifice, we need an emotional connection, to realize Jesus in all parts of our lives, including those emotions, which are beyond my comprehension. Since women are typically considered very emotional human beings, what if one does not engage her emotions or even find them within herself as typically defined femininity prescribes? Is she then any less a woman in the same way that feminists want to consider Jesus not really masculine because of His behavior? Again, who dictates the standard of gender-specific behavior? Society, surely. Yet we live in society, and so must work within the socially acceptable definitions of male and female in pursuit of a more Jesus-like life.

For Alliaume, this Jesus-like life and identification require an understanding of Jesus as a man being different, fundamentally speaking, from women. Alliaume does not delve into the differences of nature and personhood based on gender, which I acknowledge, but at least begins with anatomical differences. Alliaume desires to picture what Jesus would look like in the person of a woman, something she terms as “citing” Jesus: “To ‘cite’ Jesus with one’s body refers to what appears to be a preexistent relationship on congruity between Jesus and a woman, a relationship that is actually created in that citation.” So with this whole identification through citation or picturing (the world sacrament as living picture comes to mind)… does it deepen an existing relationship, create a whole new form of relationship? Unimaginable? Why bother trying to “cite” Jesus as a woman if men do not do so as well? There is a need for men to “cite” Jesus, because the typical man illegitimately represents Jesus in his definition of maleness (why do we more often call Him the Christ then Jesus… sounds so distant, so masculine, identifying my Jesus by what He’s done. He’s more than that though) similarly to “illegitimate congruencies of women’s bodies and practice with Jesus’ body and practice.”

“Some Christian feminist theologians, finding orthodox figurations of Jesus’ significance irredeemably harmful to women, determine Christianity itself irredeemable for women” (maybe the male/typical Christianity?) How does the person of Jesus pose an oppressive figure? I look at my Jesus in the Bible and I cannot imagine how He could be oppressive even as a slave master. Feminism , I think, identifies “maleness” by the male sin tendencies, which historically have been asserted through oppression, domineering over sinful women who tend to want to over submit themselves. Feminism seeks to balance these natures of men and women, but we will never be on a level playing field, and Jesus cannot be thought of as oppressive simply because of historical male sin tendencies. I wonder how much a passive man would be judged as oppressive by the very maleness within him? “We have trouble with Jesus’ maleness because the Christian ‘convention’ of Jesus becoming human in a male body has not seemed to ‘cover’ women, has not seemed to fulfill the Athanasian adage that ‘what is not taken up is not redeemed.’”

If one accepts male headship, then of course Jesus covers women, because somehow Paul thought we needed that. What does feminism think of male headship? Probably that male sin tendency has disabled it and it is no longer desirable. So I am going to play in feminist thought for a little bit, imagine according to experience that all I knew of male nature was the indulged sin tendencies it has, then of course a male Jesus would seem bad and unredemptive; I would join Alliaume in stating, “The figure of Jesus has not ‘worked for us because the continual citations of him as Lord, king, Son have not figured in Jesus that we recognize as redemptive.” Beyond that cry of feminism for relief from a male presence which cannot be so bad as they allow (I almost want to assert that we women tend to let ourselves be taken advantage of in the initial naïveté of our natures, and our tendencies to assume guilt for sins that are not ours. We are easy, willing scapegoats, are we not?). As a woman, though, if I am told to live like Jesus that is what I want to do, fully in my womanly nature and self. Thus I concur, “the ‘reality’ of Jesus lies in the extent to which figurations and stories of Jesus constitute us and our lives.”

McLaughlin’s “transvestite Jesus” is an attempt to figure Jesus into a person acceptable to the feminist who over generalizes maleness in regards to women as being full of those terrifying sin tendencies. The “transvestite Jesus” utilizes unconventional actions of women, which did not depict typical acceptance of femininity. These are “gender-bending actions by female martyrs and saints, and looks forward to further reformulations and inhabitations of a cross-dressing Christic body.” Feminists have far too much a problem with Jesus’ maleness as an inhibiting factor to their identification with Him (though I have like concerns at times), and pose two solutions to this problem of maleness: a post-Christian abandonment of the name of Jesus, retaining only the example of His life, or those who are committed to Jesus as the most promising figure, but can’t accept Him as they first encountered Him (in His male nature, seemingly oppressive), and so attempt to reinvent His example. So how does this Jesus, who came as a man, undeniably and unmistakable, save women?

I wonder what we women want in a savior? I suppose we need some sort of identification to say our sins died with Him… we need someone that feminine spirit of ours can align ourselves to, someone to mimic even our gender-specific behavior after. After all, what do we do with those distinctly female awkward functions? There must be some identification for even our physiological/anatomical differences within Jesus. I have attempted at least one that used to be a separation factor with God, which rendered us as women physically weaker than men, but gave us a great value as the bearers of life: we lose blood differently than men. Jesus gave life through the losing of His blood, and I suppose in a way, we women do also. Can we any more deny our femininity positionally in our striving after traditionally “male” occupations and roles than we can those differences in anatomy that separate us? And yet somehow in our very difference from men, we find value through the complementing aspects of our female personhood. So how is Jesus, who came as a man, redemptive for a woman? “Jesus’ redemptive power lies ultimately in this ideal humanity, not in his maleness, nor in a spurious identification of him with the transcendent Greek Logos. His maleness is significant insofar as he renounces the privileges that accompany it.” What sort of privilege did Jesus set aside to be redemptive to the whole community, men and women, as well as provide embodiment for the whole community of Himself? I suppose we in our complementary natures need each others’ differing abilities to embody Jesus in our communal interactions.

Rosemary Radford Ruether describes Christ’s redemption as portrayed through the community of Christ who continues to embody Him, extend His identity and ideals. If this is true, “we can now encounter Christ even ‘in the form of our sister’.” If “the prototypical ‘human’ is male, while the female has always been seen as lesser than or other to full male humanity,” then the feminine status as “honorary human” must be harder to redeem than that of the typical male. Jesus came as a male, yet McLaughlin says He divested Himself of the male privilege that accompanied His gender, for she “figured Jesus’ maleness in terms if its absence.” What is the privilege exactly that Jesus forfeits? Jesus made Himself nothing, Philippians 2 tells us, taking on the nature of a servant: this reminds me of what Hopkins noted about the evolution of the ministerial position of ministers. In ancient patriarchal society, the servile positions were given to women, and now ministers are being expected to hold such positions, rendering ministers today more feminine, according to Hopkins. Again, I question how we assigned behaviors to genders. I completely agree that Jesus emptied Himself of His Godness and associated privileges in becoming human, but did He divest His humanity of anything? Isaiah 53-like description rings through the mind, for Jesus was despised and rejected; He did take on the lowest form of humanity… that of a slave or a servant… is this the way we try and see Jesus as “womanly”?

Its interesting that Jesus on a one-on-one level seemed very egalitarian but He was not revolting against the patriarchal community on that sort of a level, but in relationship. Alliaume quotes Sojourner Truth, one of those strong women who defies gender stereotypes, thus figuring Jesus, “Jesus was made by God and a women; man had nothing to do with Him.” Such seems an attempt to define Jesus by too exclusively feminine overtones—there needs to be room in Jesus for male identification too, and often I feel that feminist Christology in extreme forms attempts to exclude Jesus to women. One must wonder, if Jesus was made without the presence of a man, thus somehow without that fatherly passing on of something to do with sin (one might be able to argue about sin nature here, but that can be dealt with at a later point), did Jesus’ solely human maternity and divine paternity affect His bio-chemical make-up? The crucified, suffering Jesus obviously is too passive for men, but is He too much for women too?

Alliaume thinks that “Haraway is right that Jesus as incarnation of the ‘suffering servant’ is too easily subsumed back into the Christian patriarchal narrative of supersessionism, and I would add, the valorization of feminine sacrifice.” Thus the crucified Jesus has been deemed by feminist Christology as an unfit role model for women, and the men have already rejected Him. What are we looking for in our Jesus, then? What sort of sign or wonder would the Jesus Christianity exalts in theology have to perform in order to provide a life fit for modeling if neither gender will assume Him as a role model? Yet I have met women who have been told that in order to be obedient to God, they must assume the role of Christ as the silent, suffering servant… in obedience to the man/husband who assumes the role of God. I too at different points of my life submitted willingly when perhaps the more Jesus-like thing to do would not be submission. We cannot allow for abuse between man/wife in the assumption of roles; man cannot play the part of God over Jesus in the crucifixion, though the human unity of man and wife is supposed to picture the oneness of the Father and Son—albeit, marriage continues to pose and incomplete picture. Indeed, God’s abuse is different from man’s (if we want to use that terminology), for we cannot “abuse well” (morbid joke); human abuse is always selfish. And yet we women continue to try and love and subject ourselves to such enablement because we don’t know how else to love Jesus. We think we’re supposed to… and so until we can no longer tolerate such an understanding of Jesus, perhaps our overly trusting senses and desire to belong, be needed cause us to submit ourselves to abuse. Do we understand our Jesus through such abuse? Maybe the Father out of love for us abused Jesus, but human abuse cannot be from anything but selfishness.

So in order to prevent women from succumbing to the masochistically seductive temptation for women to voluntarily subject themselves to abuse, which is pictured as Christ-like, Alliaume attempts to find another model of behavior. Sojourner Truth is looked at as “a paradoxical figure for ‘humanity’” because of her strength of personhood in spite of being not only a woman, who were considered honorary humans, but also a black woman who was considered nothing at all. Of course it is obvious that Truth is a woman, but somehow she is significant beyond the bounds of womanhood itself, and into the area of humanity in general. Haraway uses the figure of Truth to evidence that gender and race matter in identification with Jesus, because they constrain humanity. Of course to Jesus, race is insignificant, as is gender, but we sinful, selfish humans limit the work of His grace socially between gender and ethnicity. Haraway, along with fellow feminist Fiorenza, attempt to identify “certain ‘Jesus stereotypes,’ to figure theoretical/ theological subject positions for women that do not rehearse the dangerously worn-out conventions of ‘humanity,’ but instead seek to honor differences among men and women in different social locations.” Feminist theologians are tired of righting womanly abuse of the crucifixion, and are searching for a new identity in Jesus. He was resurrected, right? Perhaps feminist christologies tend to miss the further purposes of Jesus’ life and death: to bring us to life (1 Peter 3.18).

“Feminists use two strategies, abandonment and unmasking, in resisting the effects of orthodox Christological formulations,” which feminists tend to feel suppress women into a cross beneath the angry, berating of men and male authority. Feminist theology wants to cling to Jesus in Christianity without allowing for the possibility of abuse within His personhood. Jesus doesn’t need to be a third alternative… He can be a male Jesus and provide salvation for women if we want to play around with that whole idea of Jesus denying the stereotypical male privilege. Perhaps Jesus did deny the social benefits afforded to His masculine nature by hanging around with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners, but even more than this, Jesus fundamentally denied and conquered the male domineering sin tendency. I wonder, does this mean Jesus was tempted with male versions of every sin (since He was tempted in all manners as we are), or did He face female temptations as well? Feministis like Fiorenza reconcile the maleness of Jesus with the necessary redemptive covering for womanhood by viewing Him as a paradoxical representation of womanhood in male form, “a figure for a reimagined feminist theological practice” as well as a figure that slyly/deceptively sinks into present christologies, exposing their “hierarchal interests” to reform the identity of Christianity. I guess Jesus needed a face-lift from what we have done with Him; we need to redeem the person of our Redeemer from the

My mind keeps wandering back to these origins of these explorative attempts with Jesus’ gender: We try and make Jesus into what He is not, something more than He is; we want more miraculous signs and wonders that He can cover our gender-particular needs and temptations. Perhaps we are not looking for re-incarnated persons of Jesus, but in the over-the-top feminism movement, we are shamefully stripping the person of Jesus of the nature He assumed, masculine devoid of sin, in order to invent our own signs and wonders: feminine versions of Jesus. Somewhere, we need to understand a line between female configuration of the person and work of Jesus and making Jesus into a woman or an un-man. Jesus did in fact die, and our continual sign and wonder to evoke remembrance of that sacrifice and the life we live because of it is embedded in the Eucharist. Jesus’ last act was to promise us the wonder of the Holy Ghost’s indwelling and commission us upon receipt of it. Somehow we need to remember and revitalize the sign we have been given… reimagine our Jesus or refigure Him so that we don’t forget instead of always looking for a new sign. “In other words, we must re-cite, re-site, our refigurations so that they do not reflect ourselves back to us;” I think this means I should not look at my understanding of Jesus and looking back at myself.

Looking back at myself shows nothing, because I just continue to perceive myself as perfectly or imperfectly as my imagination reveals. To see the truth, I need a mirror, I need to look at Jesus. Can a male Jesus reflect me, a woman accurately? Alliaume continues to want to use the word “covering” to refer to Jesus’ redemptive act, so she asks the question, is Jesus’ blood the sort that can wipe out female sins, female uncleanness? “Since Jesus’ incarnation as a man has not been understood as ‘covering’ women, when we ‘put Him on,’ as McLaughlin suggests, we do so illegitimately.” She does not equate covering, protection from the Father’s wrath, with the husband’s covering for his wife; that would be too much of a stretch for the Jesus sacrifice. A feminist does not want to involve a man in her redemption, in her resulting sanctification, that “putting on” of Jesus. So McLaughlin searches for a legitimized identification in Jesus, because she still finds in congruencies between His actions (from which I refuse to remove the cross sacrifice) –a  refiguration of Jesus that has to be more than a reinstatement of humanity. Perhaps this Jesus question of an identifying point for women as well as men must be prefaced with something Grant notes: “the maleness of Jesus is superseded by the Christness of Jesus.” Jesus’ messiahship holds redemptive qualities for men and women, so says Paul and the other Apostles; Jesus’ death and life affect the community. Alliaume appreciates this communal factor through stating, “what is divine about Jesus is also found in the ‘new humanity’ represented by those around Him.”

Having mentioned Sojourner Truth in her attempts to find a female point of comparison with Jesus-like tendencies, Alliaume turns to a social difference between women in identification with Jesus. The difference in Christology between black women vs. white women is typically more for black women as Jesus suffering with them, while white women are placed in a different sort of social circumstances: they are unable to think of Jesus as a co-sufferer because they are not trodden down to such a low place as the black women have been… they are captured in aristocracy while being quietly abused and exploited behind closed doors. The black women were mistreated in public, and so could identify more closely with the publicness of Jesus’ pain and suffering. “Grant recognizes that, for Christians ‘there is a direct relationship between our perception of Jesus Christ and our perception of ourselves.’” While we cannot see look at our figure of Jesus and just be looking at another picture of us, the Jesus we cling to us one whose social circumstances, ethnicity, maybe even gender offer hope for our specific situations. Such is true for the different races of women that Alliaume choses to become involved with: “After the abolition of slavery, social and economic pressure kept black women in such substitutionary roles of ‘voluntary’ surrogacy as domestics for white families, or heads of their own single-parent families” The female sin tendency of over-submission out of selfishness continues to fascinate me as I watch women manipulate Jesus in order to prevent themselves from sinning, and in the end, only find themselves without means of redemption: if Jesus does not suffer and die in one’s Christology, we miss out on the life He has already lived and have to die unworthily, unable to pay for our own unrighteousness.

Through the biblical Hagar, Alliaume sees a picture of the normal/formative experience shared by all women: submission and survival, submission for survival, and often, ultimate rejection in response for the submission. She refers to this time of Hagar’s life as her “wilderness experience.” For the black woman, Hagar’s God is felt very real-ly… making “’a way out of no way.’” This is not a liberation experience, but rather a new understanding/revelation of resources, which were not previously recognized. Equating Hagar to Jesus, we understand that we women cannot deny suffering, Hagar’s character testifies “to the impossibility of theodicy, offering only a chastened hope that, while God neither prevents nor provokes her suffering, s/he does, compassionately, ‘make a way out of no way.’”Hagar, then, is used to picture the black women of America’s Jesus, for she acknowledges the suffering and absence of new redemptive means—but that Jesus is present in the suffering and renews understanding of situations to reconfigure into redemptive possibility. Sojourner Truth, Alliaume states, is the white woman’s stereotypical figure of identification with Jesus… conquering the hardships of experiences life to achieve an ambiguous state of uncertain equality with men… performing male tasks/roles in a female body.

The Virgin Mary is also used by feminists as “corrective to the maleness-of-Jesus problem” (which really isn’t a problem, just the male sin tendency problem, I think). Somehow the submissive, gentle Mary figure is viewed as “’a model of full womanhood and liberated humanity’ for all Christian Asian women…” potentially because she retains her womanly roles which feminists continue to rebel against. “It is our own formation, whether by oppressive structures or no, that agency paradoxically lies.” Agency in this case refers to the picking up and bearing, I think, of representing…. How we are going to resemble Jesus. Alliaume plays with the difference I the words reassemble and resemble, suggesting that if a woman is going to take on the likeness of Christ, she must first reassemble the image to one into which she can step as a women: female take on male likeness? Jesus will change shape again with each female attempt to reconfigure our life-depiction of Him. We have so much freedom, then, to try and be like Jesus, if we will only let Him be who He is and stop manipulating His sacrifice, our own redemption, to extract for ourselves a life example. Of course we need to reconfigure Christianity, but that includes a realization of Jesus as our mirror, whose death and resurrection are undeniable, and thus we too are called to die to self. Feminist Christology seems to omit the need to lose the self, that female sin tendency by placing oppression’s blame on all the males. We need the promise of a salvation in our Jesus figure who will not only redeem, but continually transform us. If we deny His maleness, which truly was devoid of action in sin tendency, can we do this? How can a woman really be like Jesus?