At the beginning of her major work on feminist Christian theology, Ruether sets forth imaginatively a transformed vision of God and human relationships. She suggests that Jesus teaches of a new world, beyond the present hierarchy of more rulers and ruled, a world of brothers and sisters in which all would be equal, and help rather than lord it over one another. In contrast to the continuing hopes of Peter for a messianic ruler-king, Mary of Magdala comes to see that the death of Jesus invites us to give up our fantasies of power and revenge, and ideas of God's rule based on domination and subjection. Instead we are to build a community without rulers and without subjects.

Perhaps it is this very idea of God as a great king, ruling over nations as His servants, that has been done away with by Jesus' death on the cross. With Jesus' death, God the heavenly Ruler, has left the heavens and has been poured out upon the earth with his blood. A new God is being born in our hearts to teach us to level the heavens and exalt the earth and create a new world without masters and slaves, rulers and subjects. [10-11]

Chapter 1. Feminist Theology: Methodology, Sources, and Norms

While all theology draws on experience, feminist theology draws upon women's experience, which was virtually excluded from past theological reflection.

Every great religious idea begins with a breakthrough or revelatory experience. Such experiences provide interpretive symbols that shed light on the whole of life. Conveyed by an individual to a formative group, they gradually result in a tradition which remains vital as long as it continues to speak to and provide redemptive meaning for the individual and collective experience of the community.

A crisis arises when received interpretations of the redemptive paradigms come to contradict experience in significant ways. Then, if possible, there occurs a reinterpretation to encompass contemporary experience, while discarding institutions and traditions that contradict meaningful, just, and truthful life. Or the critic may reject the total heritage as corrupt, and then turn to alternative sources of truth. In either case, there is a need to situate oneself meaningfully in history, within a larger context of authentic and truthful life, within a community and tradition more deeply rooted in some original base of meaning and truth. This is the need to touch "a deeper bedrock of authentic Being on which to ground the self." [18]

"The critical principal of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive. [It] must be presumed not to reflect the the divine or an authentic relationship to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption. ...What does promote the full humanity of women is of the Holy, it does reflect true relation to the divine, it is the true nature of things, the authentic message of redemption and the mission of redemptive humanity." [18-19]

The positive principle, she says, has not existed in history, but has been corrupted by the sexism of male theology which names the males as norms of authentic humanity and causes women to be scapegoated for sin and marginalized. However, it is not sufficient to reverse this process. Rather women, as the denigrated half of the human species, must reach for a continually expanding definition of inclusive humanity, inclusive of both genders, of all social groups and classes. This is not a question of sameness, but of recognition of value, which also affirms genuine variety and particularity.

While working from a particular tradition that has shaped her own background (Judeo-Christian), yet rejecting exclusivism, Ruether looks for "usable foundations for feminism." and lists five of these: [1] Scripture, [2] marginalized Christian traditions, [3] primary themes of the dominant classical theology, [4] Near Eastern and Greco-Roman religion and philosophy, [5] critical post-Christian world views. (21f).While all of these are sexist, they do contain intimations of alternatives.

[1] Ruether considers the prophetic-liberating tradition within the Bible as normative and extends it to women, beginning with women of the oppressed. This tradition, she points out, criticizes the systems of power based on the corrupting principles of domination and subjugation, as well as the religious ideology and God imagery used to legitimate them. It proclaims God's defense and vindication of the oppressed and envisions a new reign of peace and justice. The beatitudes of Jesus and the Magnificat of Mary are examples, as is the baptismal formula in Galatians, which offers the vision of a new social order in which all inequality of sex, race, and class is overcome.

In this vision, people will no longer model relationships including relationships to God "after the sort of power that reduces others to servility." "Rather they will discover a new kind of power, a power exercised through service, which empowers the disinherited and brings all to a new relationship of mutual enhancement." "All power and domination relations in society are overcome by overcoming the root metaphor of relationship to God modeled on king-servant relations." (30)

[2] This egalitarian and "countercultural" character of the Jesus movement, elaborated by Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, was not preserved as the normative tradition in the New Testament. Since a patriarchal form of church came to prevail, this vision must be read between the lines and ferreted out in fragmentary from the New Testament. Throughout the centuries, fragments of this alternative egalitarian vision of Christianity were repeatedly discovered "by women mystics, female religious communities, and popular Christian movements." (35)

Yet neither the prevailing orthodox Christianity or its alternatives brings together a desired wholeness of vision that a feminist theology seeks, and so it must draw out and weave together in a new way, a way of equality and mutuality, the prophetic and liberating strands that are at least obscurely present throughout the history of Christianity.

[3] While all the categories of the dominant classical tradition have been distorted by androcentrism and hierarchalism, they can disclose different possibilities when viewed throuhg the lens of feminist criticism. The notion of a fallen condition, for example, can be seen, not as a pretext for balaming women, but as reflective of the alienation from self, others, nature, and God, that flows from the distortion of gender and other differences into structures of unjust domination and subordination.

[4] A feminist theology must also consider other religions, since the Bible and historical Christianity shaped their identities both by struggle against and incorporation of many aspects of these religions. Neither an ideological attack nor a romantic interpretation of these religions provides accurate scholarship or contemporary needs. Rather, "the Near Eastern religions are seen as providing autonomous and different resources that illuminate both what biblical religion rejected, and what it appropriated from them in transformed fashion. By entering into the dialectic ... from both sides, we might discover new insights into the foundation of Western religions and cultural consciousness." (41)

[5] Liberalism, romanticism, and Marxism are three streams of critical culture developed in opposition to the inherited religion and institutions of Christendom. Each of these were developed by males and shaped by sexist assumptions, yet a feminist counterpart of each has been elaborated. Ruether suggests a new synthesis that attempts to draw upon the best elements in each without the negative expressions that they have witnessed historically.

In conclusion, the feminist theology proposed here is based on a historical culture that includes all the elements noted above. "It seeks, in effect, to recapitulate from a feminist, critical perspective this journey of Western consciousness," and thereby "glimpse both what has been lost to humanity through the subjugation of women, and what new humanity might emerge through the affirmation of the full personhood of women." (45)

Chapter 2. Sexism and God-Language: Male and Female Images of the Divine

In this chapter, Ruether develops further the roots of an oppressive patriarchal male monotheism and suggests directions in which it may be transcended by a feminist understanding of God/ess.

The image of God as transcendent male ego, has become normative in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is linked with the conquest of nature, pictured as the conquest and surpassing of the divine Mother. To probe the roots of this development, it is useful to reach back behind patriarchal monotheism, to earlier religions in which the dominant image of the divine is female.

The most ancient image of the divine, from archeological evidence, is female. The earliest figures suggest "that the Goddess is not a focus of personhood, but rather an impersonalized image of the mysterious powers of fecundity. ... [Thus,] "we can speak of the root human image of the divine as Primal Matrix, the womb within which all things, Gods and humans, sky and earth, human and nonhuman beings, are generated." (48) It emerges in a food gathering era, dependent on the spontaneous forces of the earth.

The divine is not in some other world beyond this earth but is the encompassing source of life and renewal of life that surrounds the present world and assures its continuance. Expressed in the ancient myth of the World Egg, this image survives in the metaphor of the divine as Ground of Being. Here spirit and matter are not split hierarchically, but "that which is most basic, matter (mother, matrix), is also most powerfully imbued with the powers of life and spirit." (49)

In the ancient Near East the Goddess is paired with a God and made a positive force in the renewal of life in the newer system of urban and agricultural society. Here an elite ruling class emerges, and gives rise to an image of the divine in terms of sovereign power, to which the worshipper relates as a humble subject seeking favour from an all-powerful Lord or Lady.

One central myth in the ancient Near East tells of the dying and rising God-king, his recue by and marriage with the Goddess. As son and consort of the Goddess, the king represents the powers of vegetation and rain threatened yearly by searing drought. A second myth, the Marduk-Tiamat story, Here the old Goddess comes to represent the powers of chaos, defeated by the new powers of order, the old mother civilization supplanted by the city-states. Both myths were used at the same time.

In the Goddess-King story, beyond impersonal fertility, the goddess comes to represent wisdom, the union of divine and human order, and becomes not only Creatrix, but Redemptrix, restorer and protector of cosmic harmony. Male and female images of the divine, moreover, are equivalent rather than complementary, with no assignment of characteristics specifically on the basis of gender.

Male monotheism, however, does emerge as predominant in the Hebrew world. Its roots may lie in nomadic herding societies who imaged God as Sky-Father and were aggressively hostile to agricultural people and their religion. God becomes modelled after the patriarchal ruling class and women become symbolically repressed as the dependent servant class. they are ruled over and owned, along with children and servants, by the patriarchal ruling class, and no longer relate to God directly, but only through the male.

At the same time, male monotheism begins to split reality into a dualism of transcendent Spirit (mind, ego) and inferior and dependent nature. Bodiless ego or spirit is seen as primary, existing before the cosmos. The physical world is made as an artifact by transcendent, disembodied mind. The male is seen essentially as the image of the male transcendent ego or God, and woman is seen as the image of the lower material nature. "Gender becomes a primary symbol for the dualism of transcendence and immanence, spirit and matter." (54)

Hebrew religion, assimilates, transforms and reverses the symbol systems of the ancient Gods and Goddesses. The Sacred Marriage of the Goddess-king is transformed into the relation of patriarchal God to servant-wife. Yahwism also appropriates female images for God at certain points, describing Yahweh as mother or woman in travail, for example, especially to describe God's unconditional love and faithfulness (the root of the Hebrew word for compassion and mercy is womb). Wisdom is also portrayed as female, yet she is no longer an autonomous manifestation of the divine. She becomes merely a dependent attribute or expression of the transcendent male god, through which he conveys his work and will to creation.

In Cristianity, the male term Logos (word) is preferred to Sophia (wisdom), but serves the same theological role as ground of creation, revealer of the mind of God, and reconciler of humanity to God, and is applied to Jesus. Still, reminiscences of the male-female fulness in the divine remain present in Judaism, and the Shekinah (presence) becomes the new image of God's mediating presence in female form. In Christianity, the figure of the Holy Spirit picks up many of the Hebraic traditions of the female Sophia and Hokmah (spirit), with many early texts referring to the spirit as female.

Nevertheless, the concept of a Trinity of two male and one female "persons" remains a male dominant perspective. "The female side of God then becomes a subordinate principle underneath the dominant image of male divine sovereignty," (60) and simply ratifies the woman's subordinate and limited role in the patriarchal social order. "We need to go beyond the idea of a 'feminine side' of God, ... and question the assumption that the highest symbol of divine sovereignty still remains exclusively male." (61)

Ruether does, however, find other strands in biblical theology which contradict and point beyond this patriarchal view of God, and first offers a definition of patriarchy.

By patriarchy we mean not only trhe subordination of females to males, but the whole structure of Father-ruled society: aristocracy over serfs, masters over slaves, king over subjects, racial overlords over colonized people. Religions that reinforce hierarchical stratification use the Divine as the apex of this system of privilege and control. (61)

While Yahweh echoes many traits of the warrior king, this God does exhibit certain traits which point beyond patriarchy. The first of these is the identification of this God with liberation from slavery and oppression. The tribal confederation identified itself as liberated slaves, united in a new egalitarian society, and opposed to the stratified feudal society of the city-states, which oppressed the peasant peoples with taxes and forced labour. Here, "God is seen as a critic of this society, a champion of the social victims. Salvation is envisioned as deliverance from systems of social oppression and restoration of an egalitarian peasant society of equals." (62) The New Testament extends this prophetic consciousness to all marginalized groups in every society, and singles out class, ethnicity, and gender as the divisions overcome by redemption in Christ.

A second antipatriarchal use of God-language occurs "when divine sovereignty and fatherhood are used to break the ties of bondage under human kings and fathers." (64) Jesus' naming of God as Abba affirms a primary relationship to God based on love and trust. The early Jesus movement uses this concept to forge a community of equals, in mutual service, rather than of masters and servants, fathers and children. Moreover, because God is king and father, no human authority can claim absolute status. Once the new community bacame assimilated into the dominant society, however, the image of god as father and kiing is once again used to sacralize the authority of human lordship and patriarchy.

A third factor is the prohibition of idolatry (pictures or graven images). No pictorial or verbal representation of God is to be taken literally (although this has been done repeatedly over the centuries in painting of a powerful old, aristocratic man or the usage of the term Father). If God is both male and female-and neither, this reality can be conveyed only by use of truly equivalent female and male metaphors. "Inclusiveness can happen by naming God/ess in female as well as male metaphors." (67)

There are some truly equivalent images of the divine, such as the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven (Mt 13:31-33; Lk 13:18-21), or the lost sheep and the lost coin (Lk 15:1-10). These images are also drawn from the activities of Galilean peasants rather than the social roles of the mighty. Moreover, they do not picture divine action in parental terms. They "image god not as mother or father (Creator), but as seeker of the lost and transformer of history." (68)

If all language for God/ess is analogous not literal, then male language for the divine must lose its privileged place. If God/ess is not validator of but liberator from the existing hierarchical social order and towards a new community of equals, then language about God drawn from kingship and hierarchical power must lose its privileged place. Images of God/ess must include female roles and experience. They must be drawn from activities of people at the bottom of society. "Most of all, images of God/ess must be transformative, pointing us back to our authentic potential and forward to new redeemed possibilities." (69) God language cannot validate stereotypical roles of men and women. Nor must it overstress parental models. These suggest roots, the sense of being grounded in the universe, but they can also suggest a kind of permanent parent-child relationship to God or be used to validate the patriarchal family and society model. "We need to start with language for the divine as redeemer, as liberator, as one who fosters full personhood and in that context speak of God as creator, as source of being." (70)

Feminist theology must also reject a dualism of nature and spirit, similarly polarized as female and male. Otherwise, liberation becomes liberation of transcendent, disembodied spirit from immanent, mindless matter, of uprooted freedom from confining necessity. Such dualism can also include the identification of the ground of creation with existing oppressive social systems. In this way the uprooting God of Exodus is made to negate the God/ess as Matrix, as source and ground of our being. In rejecting such patriarchal dualisms, "Feminist theology needs to affirm ... the God/ess who is the foundation (at one and the same time) of our being and our new being [and] embraces both the roots of the material substratum of our existence (matter) and also the endlessly new creative potential (spirit)." (70-71) Patriarchal society erects a false system of alienated dualisms modelled on its distorted and oppressive social relationships. Liberation is constant breakthrough to new possibilities that are at the same time regrounded in the primal Matrix, the original harmony. "The liberating encounter with God/ess is always an encounter with our authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not experienced against but in and through relationships, healing our broken relationships with our bodies, with other people, with nature." (71)

Chapter 3. Woman, Body, and Nature: Sexism and the Theology of Creation

In this chapter, Ruether correlates the domination of women with the domination of nature, and the alleged superiority of culture over nature. She considers some factors in the devaluation of women and nature to be the male puberty rite that uproots the male from the previous female context which becomes regarded as inferior to the 'cultural' activities of hunting and warfare, the burdening of women with domestic reproduction and production-of children and of cooked food and clothes for men, and the reduction of women to silence in the male cultural activities. Women take care of daily necessities, while men turn to ritual and leisure functions. "Men occupy the realm of freedom and confine women to the realm of necessity," (75) and thus see women as a threat to freedom. "Male transcendence is defined as flight from and warfare against the realm of the mother, of the body and nature, all that limits and confines rather than being controlled by the human (male)." (75)

Some ambivalence does remain in that woman may symbolize both the inferior part of human nature and yet also as the original source of life as support and inspiration. Nature, too, at once expresses the sub-human realm and chaos to be controlled and also evokes the cosmos, the matrix of all things, pervaded with divine order and harmony.

The correlation of femaleness with lower nature against higher order changes dramatically from Babylonian to Hebrew to Greek thought. In Babylonian and Canaanite mythology, the Divine is within, not transcendent to the matrix of chaos-cosmos. In Hebrew thought, God is elevated above the creation which he "makes" from outside as an artisan or by his word of command. God comes to be viewed as sovereign over both cosmos and chaos, which become instruments of God's moral sway. Greek thought presents a more radical dualism and alienation between male consciousness and nonhuman nature. It raises human (male) consciousness to the same transcendent status as God, outside and above nature, and mind must struggle to subdue and order this inferior realm of the visible world and bodily existence. Women are analogous to this lower realm and so also to be ruled or shunned by the male mind. The chain of being becomes the chain of command.

The end of the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity sees the emergence of a world-fleeing spirituality as dominant, the attempt to extricate mind from matter by ascetic practices. This is a flight from all that sustains physical life-sex, eating, reproduction, even sleep-as a realm of death to the sole mental realm of consciousness as true life. "Women ... are the bearers of death, from which male spirit must flee to 'light' and 'life.'" (80) These negative images were instrumental in leading to the later bouts of witch-hunting.

From the Renaissance and the scientific revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, came a secularization of nature, which is seen as pervaded by universal reason and subject to human knowledge and use. Nature then comes to be regarded as a machine manufactured and run from outside by divine reason, and technology gives rise to the dream of transforming nature more and more into articfacts for human use. But this domination is "purchased by increasing domination over the bodies and resources of dominated people." (83)

An ecological feminist theology of nature calls into question this whole hierarchical model of the chain of being and command. "The God/ess who is primal Matrix, the ground of being-new being, is neither stifling immanence or rootless transcendence. Spirit and matter are not dichotomized but are the inside and outside of the same thing." (85) There is spirit, life energy, "thou-ness" in all beings. The more complex forms of life, though having more mobility and freedom for response, "are radically dependent on all the stages of life that go before them and that continue to underlie their own existence. ... Human beings cannot live without the whole ecological community that supports and makes possible our existence. The privilege of intelligence, then, is not a privilege to alienate and dominate the world without concern for the welfare of other forms of life. On the contrary, it is the responsibility to become the caretaker and cultivator of the welfare of the whole ecological community upon which our own existence depends." (87-88)

"We have only two real options: either to learn to use our intelligence to become servants of the survival and cultivation of nature or to lose our own life-support system in an increasingly poisoned earth." (89) The emphasis on linear, dichotomized thinking, left-brained rationality, is ecologically dysfunctional, and needs to be corrected by right-brain spatial and relational thought, which is attuned to the necessary balance and harmony.

Nature is a product not only of natural evolution but of human historical development. An ecological ethic, "converting our minds to the earth," demands also that we examine and change our human relationships and the structures of social domination and exploitation that might appear necessary, but "actually support the profits of the few against the many."(91) Nature has been marred and distorted by human misdevelopment, the rapine of the globe, the domination of nature for the immediate advantage of the dominant class, race, and sex, at the expense of the welfare of the whole community."The remaking of our relation with nature and with each other, then, is a historical project and struggle of re-creation. Nature will never be the same as it would have been without human intervention. Although we need to remake the earth in a way that converts our minds to nature's logic of ecological harmony, this will be a new synthesis, a new creation, in which human nature and nonhuman nature become friends in the creating of a livable and sustainable cosmos." (91-92)

Chapter 4. Anthropology: Humanity as Male and Female

Christian theological anthropology sees humanity as having a dual structure: an authentic humanity  united with God (image of God), on the one hand, and a fallen, distorted, and sinful humanity, on the other. This duality has been correlated to maleness and femaleness in an ambiguous way. While there is an affirmation of the equivalence of maleness and femaleness in the image of God, there is  also an
hierarchical scheme of mind and reason over body and passions, with the latter seen as the source of sin and correlated with femaleness in its physical and sexual nature. As representing the relational and spiritual power of the self, the male is normative. As an “inferior mix,” and in punishment for her responsibility for sin, woman is under subjugation to man. She can never represent the image of God as fully as man.

With varying nuances, this view of the inferiority of woman to man, and her consequent subjugation to him, pervades the whole of classical Christian theology, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth. There have been also throughout the history of Christianity, “theologies of woman’s original equality with man, restored in Christ.” (99)

Ruether presents what she terms an eschatological feminism, a liberal feminism, and a romantic feminism. The first is found in mystical ascetic groups in the first two centuries, and revived in varied form by left wing Protestantism (e.g., Quakers, Shakers). These groups stressed that in an original transcendent state, male and female were equal, and that this equality should be reflected in the Church, and will be such in heaven, though not  in human history on earth.

Liberal feminism, emerging in the 18th century, “identifies nature or the order of creation with the original unfallen imago dei [not patriarchy] and affirms the equivalence of all human beings in this original creation. All human beings, male and female, share a common human nature, characterized by reason and moral conscience.” (102) It secularizes the doctrine of the image of God, and regards the distortion of equality into domination and subjugation as a fall, not into bodily, finite existence, but into injustice. The common rights of all persons have been distorted into the inherited privileges of the few, and are to be restored through a new social order achieved by social reform or revolution.
 
Romantic feminism stresses the differences between male and female as complementary opposites, and defines femaleness, not from carnality and sin, but from “intuitive spirituality, altruism,  emotional sensitivity, and moral (sexual) purity.” (104) In its conservative, reformist, and radical expressions, respectively, it confines these qualities to the sphere of the home, regards them as a basis for reform
of social institutions, or repudiates male culture altogether and “withdraws into the female sphere as a separate enclave of female values.” (108)

Ruether tries to sort out what she regards as the important truths from the inadequacies of both liberal and romantic feminism. “We need to affirm ... that all human possess a full and equivalent human nature and personhood,  as male and female.” (111) These exist as reproductive role specialization, but have no necessary connection with psychological or social role differentiation, which spring from
culture and socialization. Both sexes have the capacity for psychic wholeness. Both men and women need to develop capacities for rational thought  in a way that integrates these with relational modes of thought. Further, psychic integration demands a social integration that overcomes the schizophrenia of mind and society. This task means not just a sharing of both domestic and public roles by men and women. It demands an integration of “the public and the private, the political and the domestic spheres in a new relationship that allows the thinking-relational self to operate throughout human life as one integrated self rather than fragmenting the psyche across a series of
different social roles. Women want to turn down the walls that separate the self and society into ‘male’ and ‘female’ spheres. This demands not just a new integrated self but a new integrated social order." (113)

     Redeemed humanity, reconnected with the imago dei, means not only recovering
     aspects of our ful psychic potential that have been repressed by cultural gender
     stereotypes, it also means transforming the way these capacities have been made to
     function socially. We need to recover our capacity for relationality, for hearing,
     receiving, and being with and for others, but in a way that is no longer a tool of
     manipulation or of self-abnegation. We need to develop our capacities for rationality,
     but in a way that makes reason no longer a tool of competitive relations with others.
     Recovering our full psychic potential beyond gender stereotypes thus opens up an
     ongoing vision of transformed, redeemed, or converted persons and society, no longer
     alienated from self, from others, from the cosmos, from the Divine. (113-114)

This is a self and world still to come, yet it is also our true self and world, the foundation and ground of our being, that we recognize as our authentic self.

Chapter 5. Christology: Can a Male Saviour Save Women?

“Classical Christology brings together two ideas: that of a messianic king of a new age of redemption and that of the divine wisdom which grounds and discloses the cosmos and unites the human with the divine. It is significant that both ideas, in their remote, pre-Hebraic origins, feature a central female divine actor.” (117)

Canaanite and ancient Near Eastern thought is centred in the story of annual world renewal in which the dying and rising vegetation kind is resurrected through the power of the Goddess. The figure of divine wisdom is also represented as the Goddess. This influence is found as well in the Hebrews depicton of wisdom as a female figure, and is identical theologically to what the New Testament describes as the Logos or “Son” of God. At the same time, they transform the theme of the annual renewal of the world and its rescue from chaos and death. They sever this theme from its links with the agricultural cycle and interpret it as a moral and historical drama. Devastation of the land and its people is seen as divine punishment for their transgressions and apostasy, and hope for renewed harvests, peace, and justice, is seen as a reward for renewed fidelity to their God.

The idea of the Messiah (God’s anointed) is a special feature of a general hope for a coming Reign of God. The king is seen both as one chosen by God (Son of God) and as representative of the people before God (Son of Man). Through the kings righteousness and special relationship with God, the favour of God and the happiness of the people is assured. This hope becomes directed towards a future king, envisioned as a conquering warrior.

“Jesus seems to express a radicalized view of the concept of the coming Reign of God as a time of vindication of the poor and oppressed, ... [the] marginalized groups and classes.” (120) He rejects a nationalist-revenge mythology, and envisions a time on earth when structures of domination are overcome, basic human needs are met, and people dwell in harmony with one another and with God.

He resymbolizes the notion of the messianic prophet, and by implication, the image of God, not as king but as servant. He identifies divine redemptive activity with the lowest persons in society (slaves) rather than the highest (kings). Jesus does not mean that people are to be "good slaves" unquestioningly subjecting themselves to the existing social order or bondage. He uses the term servant in a prophetic-religious sense, presupposing a special relation to God. “By becoming servant of God, one becomes freed from bondage to all human masters. Only then, as a liberated person, can one truly become ‘servant of all,’ giving one's life to liberate others rather than to exercise power and rule over them.” (121)

The transformation of Christian reflection on Jesus into orthodox Christology takes place over five centuries, during which time the church itself is transformed from a marginal Jewish sect to the new imperial religion of the Roman Empire. Initially the first followers were shocked at his crucifixion, and then, in light of the “Resurrection experience,” came to reinterpret his mission in terms of a
redemptive suffering servant, wh o lives on in the prophetic Spirit, alive in the midst of the early community, “as a power of both ecstatic utterances and gifts of forgiveness and healing.” (122) This community understands itself apocalyptically as living in the final moments of fallen human history.

Early on a conflict arises between the original more charismatic order and a developing institutional order (prophets versus bishops), and the latter prevails. “Both the interpretation of the words of Christ  and the power of reconciliation with God is to be wrested from the hands of charsimatics, prophets, and martyrs and placed in the hands of the episcopacy, which takes over the claims of apostolic authority.” (124)

The third and decisive step in the patriarchalization of Christology takes place in the 4th century with the establishment of the Christian Church as the imperial religion of a Christian Roman Empire. “A Christianity installed in political power over the ‘world’ can now reintegrate the Messiah symbolism with its ancient roots in kingship ideology.” (124-125) The notion of the Messiah king is used to
legitimate the existing political and social hierarchy, and that of Christ as Logos or ground of the created world is is inter[preted as foundation of the existing social system. All is integrated into one vast hierarchy of being. The Logos of God governs the cosmos, the emperor and church govern the political order, masters govern slaves, and men govern women. In this scheme, Christ becomes the
All-Ruler, the apex of a system of social control, the normative male who discloses a male God. This male-dominant Christology has emerged in recent years as central in the argument against women’s ordination. The 1976 Vatican declaration calls for a “physical resmblance between the priest and Christ.” ruether adds: “The possession of male genitalia becomes the essential prerequisite for
representing Christ, who is the disclosure of a male God.” (126)

Nevertheless, there did emerge minority and alternative perspectives. “Androgynous Christologies,” found especially in the mystical tradition, see Christ as representative of the new humanity that unifies male and female. In these approaches, whether they identify women with the lower material nature and so with finitude and sin, or with the higher spiritual qualities of altruistic love, never allow a woman to represent full human potential. They presuppose a psychic dualism that identifies certain qualities a masculine and feminine, and exclude women from roles of power and leadership identified as male.

“Spirit Christologies” view the prophetic spirit of Jesus as continually present in the community and continuously revealed through the prophetic words of men and women of every age. This view was suppressed by the institutionalized church and found expression in small movements dissatisfied with the “masculinist Christ and clerical Church,” and “dream of a new dispensation of the divine in which
women will represent new, not yet imagined dimensions of human possibility and divine disclosure.” (132) The 19th century Shakers, for example, as well as radical feminism’s return to the Goddess “continue this line of revolt against the Christian world in the name of new human possibilities.

In the light of the above survey of classical, androgynous, and spirit christologies, which lead to an impasse, is there any possibility for a feminist Christology? “ A starting point for this inquiry must be a reencounter with the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels, not the accumulated doctrine about him but his message and praxis.” (135) This study reveals a figure remarkably compatible with feminism, especially in his criticism of the religious and social hierarchy.

“Fundamentally, Jesus renews the prophetic vision whereby the Word of God does not validate the existing social and religious hierarchy but speaks on behalf of the marginated and despised groups of society. Jesus proclaims an iconoclastic reversal of the system of religious values. ... This reversal of social order doesn't just turn hierarchy upside down, it aims at a new reality in which hierarchy and dominance are overcome as principles of social relations.” (135-136)

“Jesus revises God-language by using the familiar Abba for God. He speaks of the Messiah as servant rather than king to visualize new relations between the divine and the human. Relation to God no longer becomes a model for dominant-subordinate relations between social groups, leaders, and the led. ... Relation to God liberates us from hierarchical relations and makes us brothers-sisters of each other. Those who would be leaders must become servants of all."(136)

Women play an important part in this gospel vision of the vindication of the lowly. As the oppressed of the oppressed, they are at the bottom of the present social hierarchy. They are not representatives of the ‘feminine,’ but of “those who have no honor in the present system of religious righteousness.” (137)  Moreover, Jesus’ “ability to speak as liberator does not reside in his maleness but in the fact
that he has renounced this system of domination and seeks to embody in his person the new humanity of service and mutual empowerment.” (137)

Chapter 6. Mariology as Symbolic Ecclesiology: Repression or Liberation?

In Christian theology, the feminine can appear only as an expression of the creature, not as an aspect of God, and represent either the original creation or the new creature (eschatological). “As such, the good feminine is a spiritual principle of passive receptivity to the regenerating powers of God.” (139)

The most important theological symbol of the feminine in the Christian tradition is that of the Church as bride of Christ and mother of all Christians. Although it has ancient Near Eastern roots, reflected in the Song of Songs, which reflect equality and mutuality, this symbol is given a patriarchal slant which sanctions the model of paternalistic male and submissive female.

     The early Christian symbol of the church as the eschatological bride of Christ and
     mother of Christians is developed in a framework that is clearly antisexual and
     antimaternal. The framework of eschatology itself is shaped by negation of the sexual
     and maternal roles of real women. The female roles have been both sublimated and
     taken over by male ‘spiritual’ power. ... Male eschatology is built on negation of the
     mother. ... Antisocial asceticism is itself based on the fantasy that, by escaping the
     female realm of sexuality and procreation, one can also free oneself from finitude and
     mortality. The escape from sex and birth is ultimately an attempt to escape from death
     for which women as Eve and mother are made responsible. (143-144)

The imagery of the mystical union of Christ and the soul is dependent on the Christ-Church relationship, and again portrays Christ as essentially male and the soul as female, in a pattern of dominance and submission. “The femininity of the soul to Christ was the apex of a whole system of masculine rule and feminine submission that included the submission of the laity to the clergy, servants to masters, and, of course, wives to husbands.” (149)Men too learned to cultivate submission in relation to hierarchical authority above them–God, ministers, governors, masters. But they too played ‘God’ as masculine authority to those under them, as did some women over children and servants.

Ruether concludes: “we must question the male theology of female ‘disobedience’ and sexuality as cause of sin, and mortality as consequence of sin. This very effort to sunder us from our bodies and to scapegoat women as cause of mortality and sin is the real sin. This sin has alienated us from that fruitful unity of mind and body that we have lost and that we seek in our redemptive quest.” (152)

She then asks: “Is there any basis for an alternative Mariology ... that would allow us to name sexism itself as sin and point toward the liberation of women and men from the dualisms of carnal femaleness and spiritual femininity?" (152)

In response, Ruether says that Luke’s Gospel sees God's grace to Mary as bearer of the messianic child as expression of a revolutionary transformation of an unjust social order. Hestresses that Mary's motherhood, her birth-giving, is a free choice, and that this free choice is the expression of her faith and the key to the new redemptive community of Jesus. Rather than the older family relationships, the “voluntary community based on mutual choice is seen as the true family of Jesus.” (154)

“Lucan Mariology suggests a real co-creatorship between God and humanity. ... The free act of faith is possible only when we can recognize the genuine unity between response to God and our own liberation. Faith ceases to be heteronomous submission to external authorities and becomes a free act. Only through the free human responsiveness to God is God enabled to become the transformer of
history. ... This is the radical dependence of God on humanity, the other side of our dependence on God, which patriarchal theology has generally denied. Mary's faith makes possible God's entrance into history.”(154)

According to Luke, God enters human history through Mary's faith in order to effect a liberating revolution in human relationships. Affluent Christians have the bias that God leaves rich and pooor, oppressors and oppressed as they are, that salvation has nothing to do with changing the relationship. Luke links salvation with real social transformation. The poor experience God's redemption as
restoration of their humanity. The privileged experience it initially as wrath and judgment, shattering their systems of privilege and ideologies of righteousness. Only after they accept this truth can they join the liberated poor in the new age of God's peace and justice. “Social iconoclasm plays a key role in Luke's understanding of God's redemptive work. Luke stresses stories of divine favour and
forgiveness on classes of people who are despised by the wealthy, powerful, and traditionally religious.” (156)
 
“Mary as Church represents God's ‘preferential option for the poor.’”(157) The despised woman as poorest of the poor has symbolic priority in the Church. It is God who opts for the poor because the rich have opted against them, and that is why they are poor. God opts for the poor to overthrow unjust relationships. “The Church is, first of all, the poor and oppressed whom God is vindicating.” (157)

Chapter 7. The Consciousness of Evil: The Journeys of Conversion