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A Feminist Re-Visioning of a Christian Theology of Sin

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A Feminist Re-Visioning of a Christian Theology of Sin ATR/S8:2 Sin—No More? A Feminist Re-Visioning of a Christian Theology of Sin JOY ANN MCDOUGALL* There is a largely unquestioned consensus in North Atlantic feminist Christian theology against speaking of sin either as a ruptured relationship or refusal of a transcendent God's will for humankind. In contrast, this article explores what a feminist the­ ology of sin might look like, if it is rooted in humanity's dynamic relationship to a radically transcendent gift-giving God. In what follows, Daphne Hampson's "After Christianity' exemplifies the position that Christianity's classical symbolic order is incompati­ ble with feminist views of selfhood and equitable gender relations. Second, Hampson's claims are contested by the view that a radi­ cally transcendent God can be a source of human empowerment, as shown in Kathryn Tanner's theology in 'Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity." Finally, the author demonstrates how Tanner's con­ cept of sin as "blockage" or "blindness" to God's gift-giving, once "rhetorically re-dressed" in feminist terms, can overcome the gen­ der troubles with the classical Protestant paradigmi of sin as pnde. Whatever Happened to the Feminist Doctrine of Sin? No doctrine in Christian theology has proved more vexing to con­ temporary North Atlantic feminist theologians than that of sin. In the early seventies Valerie Saiving and Judith Plaskow touched off an initial feminist protest against the doctrine by challenging the para­ digm of sin found in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. * Joy Ann McDougall is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. This paper was originally presented at the An­ nual Meeting of the Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians, San Antonio, Texas, in November 2004. The author thanks her colleagues at Emory University, Elizabeth Bounds, Wendy Farley, Tom Long, and Steffen Lòsel, for their criticisms of earlier versions of the article, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion which provided her with a summer grant to complete this project. 215 216 Anglican Theological Review Saiving and Plaskow argued that Niebuhr and Tillichs versions of the Protestant paradigm of sin as pride—in Pauls terms, being boastful or puffed up in one s faith—hardly fit the lived experience of women, who suffered more from exaggerated humility and self-subordination than from self-exaltation.1 Defining sin in terms of the rebellious will (or in modern terms as the self-inflated ego) presumed a notion of au­ tonomy and agency that many women do not enjoy. Not only does the sin of pride or self-exaltation miss the mark in identifying the source of women's alienation, but also such sin-talk has proven complicit in women's gender captivity. For many women, sin-talk functions as a "rhetoric of otherness": a cultural mechanism that assigns to women false guilt and self-blame, and in so doing traps them on the underside of the economy of gender relations.2 While feminist theologians may speak with one voice against the root paradigm for sin as pride, they propose highly differentiated hermeneutical, sociopolitical, and rhetorical strategies in reconstruct­ ing Christian discourse about sin.3 One way to analyze what has happened to the feminist doctrine of sin is to observe the various 1 Valerie Saiving, "The Human Situation: A Feminine View" Journal of Religion 40 (April 1960): 100-112; Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Boston, Mass.: University Press of America, 1980). 2 Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2000), 96. 3 For the purposes of this essay I include only white feminist theologies of sin in my typology. This is not to suggest that there are not significant proposals on the doc­ trine of sin and on the related issue of theodicy among the wide circles of womanist and mujerista theologians and feminist theologians from other parts of the world out­ side of the Christian West. Rather, I have abstained from including such proposals in my typology, so as not to subsume hegemonically their distinctive concerns within my feminist discourse. Since race and class always intersect with gender dynamics in any cultural context, further theological work is needed in order to draw my feminist pro­ posal into critical conversation with womanist, mujerista, and other women theolo­ gians' reconstructions of the doctrine of sin. Given the tremendous diversity among such proposals, such discussion lies behind the scope of this essay. For an introduction to womanist theologies of sin, see Jacquelyn Grant, White Woman's Christ and Black Woman's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Re­ sponses (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1989); Emilie M. Townes, ed., A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993); Emilie M. Townes, ed., Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001). For mujerista theologies, see Ada María Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha: A Hispanic Woman's Liberation Theology (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993). For a provocative example of a Latin American feminist theology of sin, see Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women's Experience of Evil and Salvation (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2002). A FEMINIST RE-VISIONING OF SIN 217 migrations of the doctrine from its locus within modern theological anthropology.4 With that in mind, let me provide a brief typology of three such migrations: first, to the doctrine of redemption/libera­ tion; second, to the doctrine of creation; and third, within theological anthropology itself. For many of the pioneering Christian feminist theologians, recon­ structing the doctrine of sin meant identifying patriarchy as the origi­ nal sin from which both men and women need liberation. In the early eighties so-called second-wave feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell, and Sallie McFague exposed the sym­ bolic and social order that supported patriarchal relations of domina­ tion and subjugation.5 Each sought to liberate humankind and indeed all of creation from their bondage to this patriarchal social order, by of­ fering alternative models of right relations built on equality, mutuality, and friendship. These feminist proposals were more than socio-ethical programs of liberation. They were full-scale programs for reforming the Christian tradition. Along with analyses of sin and redemption, each proposed distinct linguistic strategies for reforming Christian God-talk and its gender anthropology, so that women might gain the agency to shape their own notions of God, self, and world. Building on these pioneering analyses of patriarchy as original sin, a second group of feminist theologians took a different path to re­ dressing the gender trouble with sin. In the late eighties and nineties feminist process theologians such as Catherine Keller, Rita Nakashima Brock, and Marjorie Suchocki, as well as religious ethicists such as Wendy Farley and Kathleen Sands, challenged the Christian Wests over-preoccupation with sin.6 They criticized Western theology's ex­ planation of the problem of evil as the fallout from original sin and, 4 This is a feminist play on David Kelseys questioning of modern theology in 'Whatever Happened to the Doctrine of Sin?" Theology Today 50 (July 1993): 169- 178. In this essay Kelsey traces three migrations of the doctrine of sin away from the doctrine of creation to theological anthropology, redemption/liberation, and Christol- ogy. In this essay I am pursuing an analogous strategy by tracing three migrations of the feminist doctrine of sin. 5 See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist The­ ology (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1983); Letty Russell, The Future of Partnership (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1979); Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theol­ ogy for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1987). 6 See Catherine Keller, From A Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1986); Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988); Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (New York: Continuum, 218 Anglican Theological Review therefore, as humankinds rightful punishment. Moreover, they ques­ tioned the metaphorical landscape of sin-talk in the West with its ju­ ridical and penal imagery. Such a theology of sin heaped needless shame and false guilt on women while doing little to address concrete human suffering. This second group of feminist theologians proposed a radical cure: abandon the Augustinian creation and fall narrative and with it the whole notion of original sin. They replaced this dominant narrative with either a process or else a tragic account of creation, in which the world was tainted with violence and vulnerable to the wound of sin from its inception. Each criticized the equation of divine power with omnipotence, and in so doing, treated the possibility of sin and evil in the world as an original cosmic flaw.Throug h these reconstructed ac­ counts of creation and theodicy, they sought to relieve women from sin s burden of shame and guilt. At the same time they proposed con­ crete ethical measures in the Christian life that urged all human beings to ameliorate the
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