A little report on a book that I read recently … A review of another Crossway book on a similar topic is posted at the moment at www.wineskins.org.
Jesus and the Feminists: Who Do They Say That He Is?
By Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger
Crossway, $19.99
That splashing sound you hear is Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger swimming against the tide when it comes to religion and sex/gender — or at least against the tide in certain seas. Decades ago, Köstenberger writes, Albert Schweitzer found that many of those seeking the “historical Jesus” found someone who looked much like … well, themselves. In Jesus and the Feminists: Who Do They Say That He Is?, Köstenberger takes on a similar question, and what emerges is “not one version of the true Jesus but many different accounts of who feminists perceive Jesus to be.”
“The evidence shows that the feminist quest for self-fulfillment and self-realization leads to a distortion of the message of the Bible,” the author writes. “In an attempt to fit Jesus into their feminist mold, feminists are ultimately kept from experiencing the fulfillment they are seeking.”
In Köstenberger’s view, the problem with full-blown feminist theology is that the feminism trumps the theology – on the question of which comes first, Scripture or one’s sex, the answer is too often the latter.
Köstenberger divides her thinkers into three strains: radical, reformist and biblical evangelical/egalitarian. The radicals – examples are Mary Daly, Virginia Mollenkott and Daphne Hampson – throw the baby out with the bathwater. This viewpoint “rejects Scripture in its entirety as irredeemably patriarchal and turns to other sources of validation .… it defines itself in direct antithesis to Scripture.”
Reformists such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and others are less thoroughgoing: The bathwater goes, but the baby can stay – IF he behaves himself. For these thinkers, “the problem lies with the church’s suppression of … earlier egalitarian impulses and with its reversion to a patriarchal, male-dominated model. Here Scripture and the church must be liberated from their patriarchal captivity.”
The biblical egalitarians, with their high view of Scripture, are cut from a different bolt of cloth: “The teaching of Galatians 3:28, that in Christ ‘there is no male and female,’ serves as the key biblical text by which all other teachings of Scripture are to be measured.”
Their problem, in Köstenberger’s mind, is that this group wants to argue from no distinctions in souls to no distinctions in roles – a leap that the author sees as unsupported by the Gospels. Jesus was indeed countercultural in his treatment of women, she says, but he was neither a feminist nor a modern egalitarian.
Köstenberger deliberately addresses only one aspect of the controversy – the title, after all, is Jesus and the Feminists rather than Jesus, Paul, Genesis and the Feminists. The greatest strength of her book is probably its documentation of the Procrustean treatment of Scripture in some feminist circles: If the text doesn’t fit the bed they’ve built, they hack it up or stretch it until it does. Why even bother?
