JESUS AND THE FEMINISTS: WHO DO THEY SAY THAT HE IS?, by Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger

A Brief Book Summary from Books at a Glance

About the Author

Margaret E. Köstenberger (ThD, University of South Africa) serves as adjunct professor of women’s studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. She is the coauthor (with Andreas Köstenberger) of God’s Design for Man and Woman. She and her husband, Andreas, live in North Carolina with their four children.

Overview

Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger surveys feminist theology from its origins. She focuses on the question of the identity of Jesus in feminist thought and the way that scholars have applied various schools of feminist theory to life in Christian faith communities. Köstenberger then contrasts these views with a complementarian account of Jesus and his treatment and teaching on women.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Foundations
1. All We’re Meant to Be: Feminism Confronts the Church
2. What’s at Stake: “It’s Hermeneutics!”

Part 2: Jesus and Radical Feminism
3. Mary Daly: Overcoming the Christian Fixation on Jesus
4. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott: Godding and Omnigender
5. Daphne Hampson: After Christianity, What?

Part 3: Jesus and Reformist Feminism
6. Letty Russell: Liberated to Become Human
7. Rosemary Radford Ruether: Womanguides and Women-church
8. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: Jesus’ Alleged “Discipleship of Equals”
9. Kathleen Corley and Others: The Case of the Crumbling Paradigm
10. The Feminist Companion and the New Face of Feminism

Part 4: Jesus and Evangelical Feminism (Egalitarianism)
11. The Early Years: Emancipation
12. The Maturing Movement: Increasing Complexity
13. Recent Contributions: Creativity and Consolidation
Part 5: Jesus and the Gospels: An Evangelical Non-feminist Reading
14. Who Do You Say That I Am? A Look at the Gospels

Conclusion

Summary

Part 1: Foundations

1. All We’re Meant to Be: Feminism Confronts the Church
2. What’s at Stake: “It’s Hermeneutics!”

Jesus asked his closest followers a question which forms a dividing line: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29). In the midst of what so many others say, each of us must make some determination on that question. Albert Schweitzer challenged the quest for the historical Jesus in the early twentieth century as the exponents of that critical approach found themselves and their own contexts in the pages of the New Testament account of Christ’s ministry. Divergent understandings of who Jesus is often signal this type of problem: we see our own contemporary concerns to the exclusion of Christ’s true identity. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16) must check our private predilections at that point. In this study we will explore feminism in its various forms and in relationship to the question of who Jesus is. Our aim is mainly to be descriptive and to leave it to the reader to evaluate how feminist authors match up to the biblical standard.

We begin by looking at the history of feminism generally. The concern for gender equality in the West has been broken into the three waves of feminism. The first wave arose in the 1830s and centered around the abolitionist movement. Its concern was primarily for racial and social justice with women’s issues added to that set of concerns. The traditional role of women in the church and the biblical texts long-thought to prohibit women from teaching or office-bearing in the church came under critique from Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, and Catherine Booth.

By 1919 women had gained the right to vote in the US and the movement saw little growth until more radical social changes started to emerge in the 1960s. Second-wave feminism received its impetus from Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Gender equality was the call and reformers challenged patriarchal and male-dominated sectors of society. This included the Christian world as well. In 1986 Christians for Biblical Equality began to organize around the theme of gender equality in the sphere of the church – this became known as evangelical feminism. Broadly then there are three groups engaging with Christian issues: 1) radical feminists who reject the Bible and Christianity as unuseable, 2) reformist feminists who reject tradition and use the Bible to construct a “proper” positive theology, and 3) biblical evangelical feminists or egalitarians. Contrast this last group to the complementarian movement of John Piper and Wayne Grudem. The third wave of feminism beginning in the 1990s is more radical in its pursuit of feminine self-realization; its concerns do not involve any guiding Christian principles so will not be considered here.

We now turn to look at feminism and the interpretive issues which affect its understanding of who Jesus is. The most important foundation for feminism and its engagement with the Bible and Christianity is hermeneutics or the science of interpretation. For feminists the narrative of history is one in which men have been at the top dominating women. For radical feminists, this structure is built into the Bible and so all of the tradition must be abandoned. For others, history must be reconstructed – a difficult task! – so that, for instance, Jesus’ ministry can be either commended or condemned.

This in turn raises a host of difficult questions familiar to many in the humanities more broadly: how do we come to know things? where does textual meaning reside: in the reader or in the author’s intent? how do we define “canon”? does the Bible have a patriarchal bias? are evangelicals the same as fundamentalists? We turn now to look at feminist answers to these questions as they touch on gender and Christianity.

Part 2: Jesus and Radical Feminism

3. Mary Daly: Overcoming the Christian Fixation on Jesus
4. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott: Godding and Omnigender
5. Daphne Hampson: After Christianity, What?

In Part 2, we look specifically at how more radical feminists have dealt with the question of Jesus, his identity, and the impact of Christianity on life and gender. It is important to note at the outset that there is a bias in radical feminism against the authority of Scripture and so specific texts are rarely treated. The emphasis is on broad theological viewpoints.

Mary Daly’s work forms a trajectory of greater and greater radicalization beginning in 1968 through the 1990s. She taught at Boston College until she was forced to resign in 2001 for refusing males entrance to her classroom. Her work looks at misogynism in the Roman Catholic church in The Church and the Second Sex. In the 1970s her work….

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