Seeking the Risen Christa

Nicola Slee

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281062560
• eBook ISBN: 9780281066032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Art and feminist theology often explore the figure of the feminine side of Christ. However, the risen Christa has had little if any coverage within these fields. Now, "Seeking the Risen Christa" (by Nicola Slee) uses a well-crafted combination of reflection, illustration and poetry to investigate the Risen Christa.

The discussion revolves around the central narratives of the gospels and the major Christological themes. These subjects are re-imagined and revisited from the hypothetical perspective of Christa.

Ultimately, Nicola Slee wants "Seeking The Risen Christ" to represent a search for a risen Christa and therefore encourage readers to develop a freer, unlimited relationship with Christ.

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Seeking the risen Christa

Introduction

Questions in search of the risen Christa

Why is the Christa always suffering, broken, dying?

Where is the risen Christa?

Why have we not realized her?

Is she still on her way to us?

How can we help her arrive?

When she comes to us, will we know her?

Will her face be turned towards us

or looking away, beyond our stifled horizons?

Will her eyes be filled with compassion or fury?

Will we dare to meet her gaze?

How will she greet us?

Will she touch us, or shake us?

What will she say to us?

Will we recognize the sound of her voice speaking?

Or will she approach through torrential silences?

Where shall we go looking for her?

Who will show us her way?

Seeking a risen Christa

Questions around the identity and significance of Jesus the Christ are not merely academic ones, but touch to the heart of lived faith. Whatever else we might want to say about Christianity, the centrality of Jesus the Christ to our faith cannot be doubted. Christians believe different things about Jesus, argue about who he was and what he was about, and disagree about the best doctrinal formulations to express Christian belief in Christ. Some emphasize that Christianity is, first and foremost, a walking in the way of Jesus rather than a holding to certain (later) beliefs about him. Others assert the primacy of the classic conciliar proclamations about Christ, as contained in the creeds, as non-negotiable and central to faith.

In my own Christian discipleship, the person and the way of Christ have been central from the start, yet the ways in which I have expressed my understanding of Jesus, and the forms my devotion to Jesus has taken, have changed quite dramatically over some four decades. Though blissfully unaware of doubts and misgivings in my early Christian journey, increasingly I have wrestled with what it can mean, not only to think or image Christ in authentic ways, but what it can mean for a feminist woman who does not wish to be in disempowering or inauthentic relation to any male Other, to be in relation to Christ within the community of those who seek to follow in the way of Jesus and live according to his teaching. Growing up in a low-church Methodist tradition and experiencing the liveliness of faith as a teenager in evangelical circles, the person of Jesus was absolutely central to my sense of faith and of God. My prayer life, my reading of Scripture and my sense of myself as saved and loved by God were all rooted in an intensely personal, quasi-erotic relationship with Jesus – a relationship I now look back on with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment. Gratitude, because Jesus truly mirrored and incarnated to me the overwhelming and costly love of God, and still does; embarrassment, because I now see how uncritically my spiritualized notion of Jesus and my privatized relationship with him mirrored some of the worst features of a white middle-class patriarchal upbringing, unthinkingly absorbed. My Jesus was made in the image of the ideal man I hoped to meet and marry: intelligent, sensitive, passionate, empathic, discerning, generous, utterly dependable and offering me a belief in myself and my worth that I did not, then, possess.¹

In time, such a model of Jesus gradually self-destructed, partly through my theological education, especially through my encounters with feminist theology; and partly through my own psychological struggles and growing. I discovered that my Jesus did not save me from the pains and confusions of family breakdown, academic failure, disappointment in love or fear of the future. Jesus was no nice husband substitute, protecting me from the challenges of life. I needed to get real and grow up, and in the process let go the clinging, cloying love-relationship to a spiritualized heterosexual lover that Jesus represented. The story of Mary Magdalene loving and losing her relationship with the earthly Jesus, as read by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel and others, came to mean much to me.² As the Magdalene had to stop clinging to her beloved Jesus and leave the garden of intimate encounter in order to discover a wider, freer Christ – so did I.³

This book – a series of poems, prayers and reflections on the Christa – is a continuation, then, of a lifelong journey of theological and spiritual quest for the incarnate, dying and risen one who mediates to human beings the face and the grace of God. To some readers, especially those versed in contemporary feminist theology, the idea of the Christa will not be new, having been debated and imaged by many feminist theologians and artists over the past three decades or so. However, for the majority of readers, I suspect the very notion of the Christa will be startlingly, perhaps disconcertingly, new. So it is important, in this introduction, to take some time to trace the history of the emergence of the idea of the Christa in recent feminist thought, to explain why this figure has emerged and what some of its meanings might be – but also, as I hope, to demonstrate that this is an idea or image which has a long and ancient past, rooted in Christian tradition, prayer and spirituality, including the Scriptures and classic Christology. Thus, while some see any attempt to image Christ in female form as outrageous, even blasphemous, I shall argue that, rightly understood, the Christa is entirely compatible with orthodox Christian faith (though this is not to say that all theologians who advocate the Christa conform to one pattern of faith), and is simply one of a myriad ways of incarnating and re-imaging the humanity and divinity of Christ so that contemporary believers – especially but not only women – may appropriate the Christian gospel anew.

In what follows, I shall first attempt briefly to set a context for the emergence of the figure of the Christa in contemporary feminist theology but also in the wider postmodern religious scene, before going on to chart in some detail the emergence of the Christa in feminist theology and art, considering some of the key representations of a female Christ by artists and exploring the range of meanings which feminist theologians bring to the Christa. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to include reproductions of the many Christa images to which I shall refer, but in most cases these are available on the web, and I shall provide full details of sources in the notes. Having begun in the present, I shall then look backwards over the history of Christian tradition to demonstrate that the idea of a female Christ is nothing new, but a very ancient idea rooted in Scripture, tradition and Christian practice down the centuries. This overview of the historical roots of the Christa cannot hope to be comprehensive or systematic, but I hope to do enough to counter any claims that the idea is a purely modern invention of feminists. Nothing, in fact, can be further from the truth – even if contemporary feminists have taken the tradition further, and fleshed it out, in ways that are startling and fresh. Finally, and returning to the project of this book, I shall outline my own journey of developing interest in the Christa, and narrate the origins of the book in a shared women’s Easter retreat a few years ago, before offering a brief overview of the book as a whole and inviting readers to share with me the journey in search of a risen Christa.

Setting a context for the Christa

The first and most obvious context within which interest in the Christa has emerged is the context of feminist theology, and in particular, feminist Christology. Feminist theologians have been debating the person of Jesus and Christian claims about the Christ for decades now, and there is a vast literature from around the globe testifying to a lively diversity of feminist Christologies.⁴ Debate has centred on a wide range of issues: questions around the historical Jesus and his attitudes towards, teaching about, and relationships with women; issues around the significance of Jesus’ gender and the symbolism of a male saviour, especially whether this reinforces or, in various ways, challenges and subverts patriarchy; questions about the cross and atonement theory and whether there are constructive ways of understanding both that are liberating for women (and men); explorations of traditional Trinitarian theologies and the place of Christ within the Trinity; exegeses of various themes within the teaching and praxis of Jesus, particularly around his teaching of the kingdom (basileia) – or kin-dom – of God, his practice of table fellowship and his inclusive friendships with many considered marginal in the mainstream religious and political cultures of his day.

These and many other themes have been explored in feminist Christologies. While post-Christians such as Mary Daly, Naomi Goldenberg and Daphne Hampson conclude that there is no possibility of redeeming Christology and that the notion of a male saviour must be abandoned,⁵ Christian feminists offer a wide range of positive proposals for rethinking classical Christology, including regendering models of Christ, rethinking the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, decentring the significance of Jesus or Christ within a wider understanding of God or Trinity, and a variety of other possible positions. Within the breadth of feminist Christological discourse, the figure of the female Christ, or the Christa, is a particularly potent image – representing one, but only one, means of refiguring, reassembling Christology. This figure provides the focus of this book, although I do not believe it is the only way of representing Christ. No one model or image, however creative or rich, can hope to hold all the shifting significance and meanings we might want to discern in the Christ. I want to explore the image and the concept of Christa, at the same time as holding open other ways of thinking about Jesus and other names for Christ.

While feminist reflection on Jesus is the most obvious context in which the Christa has emerged, I would suggest that we need to look wider in order to discern the significance of this new expression of Christology. Feminist theology, itself, can be seen as one among a number of liberation movements emerging from the repressed underside of patriarchal religion (along with black theology, post-colonial theology, gay, lesbian and queer theologies, and so on), which are both critiquing and renewing religion in radical and subversive ways. Each of these liberation movements points to the oppressive nature of religion in a variety of respects, and yet, at the same time, offers hope of renewing religion at its roots as that which has been denied, marginalized and repressed is taken back into the mainstream and enabled to heal the splits which have rent asunder the Christian tradition and the body of Christ. Liberation theology is restoring the huge spiritual and political resources of the poor to the centre of Christianity, black and post-colonial theology is returning the experience of millions of black and Asian people to the tradition, feminist theology is enabling the forgotten faith of half the human race to find its place once again at the heart of the mainstream, and gay, lesbian and queer theologies are asserting the positive value of the experience of repressed sexual minorities to our understanding of faith. In these and many other ways, liberation theology movements are both disrupting what has come to be taken for granted for millennia within the Christian mainstream and offering restoration, renewal and rehabilitation. Thus feminist and other liberation theologies can be seen to signal a wide-ranging crisis within institutional religions about the meaning and relevance of their stories, symbols and practices and the very viability of religion in the twenty-first century, even as such theologies represent creative responses to this crisis. The Christa is one example, though certainly not the only one, of a traditional religious symbol – the symbol of Christ – in crisis, in transition, in deconstruction; a symbol that is being radically questioned, critiqued, playfully parodied and imaginatively represented. While some find this a fearful and threatening prospect, undermining the stability of the tradition, others recognize and grasp with open arms the potential of such a process for revivifying and renewing the symbols and stories that are in danger of ossifying and becoming moribund.

So, I want to say, the Christa is not some minority, off-beam, idiosyncratic preoccupation of a group of specialist academics or extreme feminists – or, if it is, it nevertheless has a far greater and wider significance, beyond the confines of those who are actively preoccupied with the concept. The Christa is a signal to the wider Christian body of the creative crisis in which religion finds itself, and it is a signal of the neglected and repressed resources which Christianity has within itself to respond to such a crisis. To put this another way, the Christa is one among many symbols of a re-emergence of the (divine) feminine, both within Christianity and other faith traditions, but also outside mainstream religions, which is part of a universal movement of repressed peoples and paths finding their voices and insisting on their experience, wisdom and gifts being recognized and taken seriously. Christianity rejects that wisdom and those gifts at its peril, expelling the very life force that can heal and revivify the ancient paths.

The Christa in contemporary feminist theology and art

‘As women have been told they do not resemble the saviour, we are in the process of “reassembling” that figure.’⁶

The figure of the female Christ or the Christa has been a recurring motif in Christian feminist theological writings since the 1970s, provoked by the creation of a sculpture of that name by Edwina Sandys in 1974 for the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace (1976–1985).⁷ The sculpture – a nude female form wearing a crown of thorns with arms outstretched in the form of a crucified figure – was displayed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, during Holy Week, 1984, and caused something of an uproar, eliciting strongly divided reactions from those who viewed it. A second sculpture, Crucified Woman, made by a German-born Canadian scu...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Title Page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Seeking the risen Christa
• 2. Come as a girl
• 3. The table of women
• 4. Christa crucified
• 5. The feminist gap
• 6. Christa rising
• 7. The kin-dom of Christa
• Christa collects
• Notes, sources and acknowledgements
• Search items for titles and first lines