Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference

A Contribution to Feminist Systematic Theology

Janice McRandal

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781451484472
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451494242
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference argues that the most potent and resourceful theological response to the challenging questions of gender and difference is to be found in a retrieval of a doctrinal framework for feminist theology. In particular, it is suggested that a doctrinal narrative of creation, fall, and redemptionunderpinned by the doctrinal grammar of the Trinityprovides resources to resolve the theological impasse of difference in contemporary feminist theology. The divine economy reveals a God who enters into history and destabilizes fixed binaries and oppressive categories. The biblical narrative discloses a subtle yet potent fluidity to the Triune relationships. As created subjectsprecisely in our differencewe are sustained, affirmed, and drawn back into the Triune life. The subtleties of divine transgression are already recognized in the patterns of the liturgy, in prayer, and in practices of contemplation.

Here, bodies not only encounter the transgressive love of God but are enabled to inhabit their differentiated humanity with distinctiveness and grace. The grammar of Christian faith cannot ultimately be uncovered except in prayer, opened beyond itself to a source of life and giving.

1

Creation

1

Creatio ex Nihilo and the Nearness
of Difference

To suggest that a Christian account of human difference would find grounding in the story of creation is hardly surprising. That a narrative about Creator and creation may say something about the multifaceted forms of human difference seems self-evident. However, feminist theology has been squeamish about the biblical creation narrative, not only because of certain masculine notions of the Creator God,^[1] but also because of the particularities of male and female in the creation account. There is the difficulty of the Yahwist creation account in Genesis 2—especially the provision of woman to man—and the overwhelming binary force of the text, “male and female he created them.”^[2] The connection of feminist theology with ecological studies has given rise to an emphasis on more dignified accounts of the entire created order, while a concentration on broader scientific developments has seen a growing interest in theology’s relationship with contemporary science, including scientific accounts of the nature of gender.

What is often assumed in these constructions is an interdependent model of the God/world relationship. There are two main strategic reasons for deploying such a model. First, in order to safeguard contemporary communal conceptions of identity, causality,^[3] and even epistemology,^[4] it seems God must be imagined in a way analogous to human community. That is, conceptions of God are required to maintain harmony and balance with the created order in a horizontal relationship that frees the divine from the oppressiveness of traditional ontology. Second, a God who is in some way dependent on creation is useful for synthesizing scientific discourse with theological language.^[5] In the 1970s, David R. Griffin could confidently announce that “Christians have always needed (whether or not they have recognised this) a doctrine of creation that was consistent with the essence of Christian faith and the best science of the day.”^[6] The implicit enemy in these accounts of creation is the God of antimutuality—the naively Hellenized divine being of the creeds, as encapsulated in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Though the creatio ex nihilo doctrine is rarely analyzed with much detail, it is roundly rejected for the brutality and violence it has allegedly inflicted upon humanity, and indeed upon the entire cosmos. Thomas Jay Oord writes,

The God whose unlimited power created something from nothing is capable of completely controlling that which God creates—which is everything. The God who can create ex nihilo is essentially capable of creating something from nothing in any present moment to prevent genuine evil. The God who creates ex nihilo is culpable for failing to control creatures or creaturely events entirely and/or failing to create instantaneously from nothing that which could prevent genuine evil. In short, creatio ex nihilo undermines a coherent doctrine of divine love. Christians should reject this non-biblical idea to affirm consistently the biblical claim “God is Love.”^[7]

In contrast to this approach, I want to argue in this chapter that creatioex nihilo is in fact the most hopeful starting point for a Christian account of difference, and I want to show that feminist questions around gender are most fully appreciated and addressed from within the story of God’s creative and re-creative agency. Beginning with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and examining in particular the priestly creation account in Genesis 1—and its place within the Christian biblical narrative and tradition—will bring into focus what is at stake in the debate about creation and creaturely difference. Recent process-oriented attempts to account for difference and to liberate creaturely difference fail to consider the underlying grammar of the doctrine of creation and therefore miss an indispensable conceptual resource. For theology, the Creator/creation difference is not only the genesis of difference itself, but also the most viable place from which a broader redemptive account of difference may be developed.

Catherine Keller: Gender, Difference,
and the Becoming of Creation in Feminist Theology

For feminists, there is at lot at stake in how society frames a creation metanarrative. It has implications, for instance, for the dignity of women’s personhood within Christian communities. Ann Loades identifies four major barriers to affirming the worth of women in Christian theology: the failure to find femininity in God; the insistence that woman is derivative from and hence secondary to man; the assumption that woman is characterized by passivity; and the tendency to identify women with bodiliness as opposed to transcendent mind. In this diagnosis, Loades places particular blame on the creation account, or at least on dominant interpretations of that account.^[8] Concerns surrounding the imago dei inevitably lead to further questions about the plight of creation and the destructiveness of dualistic or binary modes of thinking. Thus, feminist theologians have taken to reinterpreting the creation story. Coinciding with a growing concern for the health and future of the earth (in the aftermath of Lynn White’s now infamous “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”^[9]), many feminist reinterpretations of the creation account involve a sustained dialogue with ecological and scientific research. In recent decades, the feminist reinterpretation of creation has often taken the form of a pantheistic retelling—an approach that has reached its highest pitch in the sophisticated process theology of Catherine Keller. In order to show how these dual concerns (deconstructing the patriarchal account of creation and engaging with ecological and scientific scholarship) have driven this process-oriented approach with its concomitant dismissal of creatio ex nihilo, I will trace the trajectory of feminist theological accounts that leads to Keller’s work.

Sallie McFague and the World as God’s Body

Sallie McFague’s arguments pertaining to metaphoric language are well-known and bear enormous importance for feminist God talk. In applying her arguments to ecological issues, McFague developed parameters around postpatriarchal modes of representing the creative order. She writes, “It would appear that the appropriate language for our time, in the sense of being true to the paradigm of reality in which we actually live, would support ways of understanding the God-world and human-world relationships as open, caring, inclusive, interdependent, changing, mutual, and creative.”^[10] McFague exposed the limits and dangers of language for God—and of God’s relation to the world—by showing how patriarchal systems of domination find footing in the language used for God and “His” relationship with the world. Of particular concern to McFague is the monarchical model for God’s relationship to creation. McFague argues that the monarch God is inherently distant from the world (here McFague appeals to Kaufmann’s “asymmetrical dualism”^[11]). The monarchical model for God renders the world remote, perhaps even cut off from the divine. This model “supports God as a being existing somewhere apart from the world.”^[12] Certainly the metaphoric imagery of a king supports this claim. And McFague makes important links with the monarchical God and substitutionary theories of atonement. Further, she observes that this monarchical God interacts only with humans, not with the rest of creation.^[13] Here McFague points to the anthropocentrism of word-focused Protestantism (and interestingly, notes the various strains of the tradition that have asked for a broader cosmological view, even quoting Augustine on this matter). Clearly, there was a need for the theological tradition to take more seriously the ecological crisis of our age, and the anthropocentric emphasis that has dominated theological discourse. As McFague notes, any tradition that cannot include the whole world is sadly lacking.^[14] Finally, McFague argues that the mode by which this God controls the world is a system of domination and benevolence. For McFague, such a God encourages passivity in humanity—a passivity that threatens the future of the earth in this “ecological, nuclear age”:

God’s action is on the world, not in it, and it is a kind of action that inhibits human growth and responsibility. . . . No matter how ancient a metaphorical tradition may be and regardless of its credential in Scripture, liturgy, and creedal statements, it still must be discarded if it threatens the continuations of life itself.^[15]

Though, as I will show, these two ideas—the monarch God and God’s difference from creation—should not be conflated, McFague is right to point to the foundational underpinning of the patriarchal worldview in a specific interpretation of “creation.” However, there is a distinct coadunation here between ideas of sovereignty and creative power. And this argument is made against a particular model, a particular way of reading creation and sovereignty. As McFague narrates her key critiques of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Feminist Theology, Difference, and Christian Discourse
• Creation
• Fall
• Trinity
• Bibliography
• Index