Are You a Theological Feminist?

I came across a very helpful summary of “theological feminism” today, in Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s God For Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life.

So I share it with you:

Theological feminism is the critique of the androcentric [male-centered] bias of theology in which God is imaged and conceptualized as male, male experience is assumed to be normative for human experience, women are identified with the carnal and irrational, and are assumed to be responsible for the entry of sin into the world.

Woman is seen as complementary and subordinate to man. According to this “theology of complementarity” man is the head of woman; man fully images God while woman images God by virtue of her relationship to man; woman is helpmate of man; woman has a special, preordained, divinely decreed place in creation, which is the sphere of home and family; she is equal to though less than man.

This theology of complementarity extrapolates from bodily differences an in-built dissimilarity in roles; woman’s role is private and domestic, man’s is public leadership and headship. Theological feminism rejects this reading of sex differences and disagrees that God has eternally decreed that men are superior, women inferior. From the standpoint of feminist theology this is not the preordained intended order of creation but the order of fallen humanity, fallen creation.

The project of theological feminism is to recover women’s experience and integrate it into theological reflection, to search the tradition for what has contributed to women’s subjugation, and to search the tradition also for liberating elements (for example, the ministry of Jesus to outcasts; his self-revelation and postresurrection appearances to women).

Feminism is intensely concerned with the realm of the personal and relational. Simply defined, feminism is the belief that women and men are equal in dignity as human beings. The opposite of feminism is androcentrism, which, whether unconsciously or not, views the male as normative for humanity. (267)

With that definition in mind, I have to say: count me in! I’m a feminist theologian. Are you?