Sunshine Cathedral Blog

by Rev. Dr. Mona West

Delivered at Redeeming Jesus: A Progressive Christianity Mini-Conference (Sunshine Cathedral, Jan. 22-23, 2010)

Lesbian feminist theologian Carter Heyward reminds us that including the gospels themselves, any representation or interpretation of Jesus is influenced by political and historical contexts as well as issues of race, class, gender—all the contours of our lives. Not only have others shaped Jesus in their own image, multiple images of Jesus throughout history have shaped human existence as well.

Heyward declares “Because of [Jesus], we Christians are stretched beyond what we might have been without these stories and images of a radically faithful brother. And because of us, his sisters and brothers, the images of Jesus are stretched way beyond the horizons that we, or those who have gone before us, could have envisioned….We are drawn selectively to certain images and stories of Jesus (and ourselves) on the basis of our cultures and communities, faith journeys, personal needs, and political commitments.” (Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right, p. 3)

I have been asked to speak about “feminist interpretations” of Jesus in this opening plenary. I want to do that in the context of my own journey with Jesus as a white educated middle class lesbian raised Southern Baptist in Louisiana in the 50’s and 60’s. I have titled this plenary, “My Journey with Jesus: Reconciling a Feminist Hunger with a Spiritual Thirst.”

In light of Heyward’s remarks just shared, I would list the images of Jesus that have shaped me and that I have helped to shape as:

• The dining room table Jesus
• The knocking at your heart’s door Jesus
• The search for the historical Jesus
• The feminist Jesus
• The queer Jesus
• Jesus as spirit person
• Jesus as fleshy portal into God’s own heart
• Jesus brother of God’s yearning and desire in me

I want to speak briefly about each of these images in my own journey with Jesus as a way to contextualize the more detailed remarks I will make about feminist interpretations of Jesus.

The earliest image I have of Jesus as a girl child growing up Southern Baptist in Louisiana in the 1950’s and 60’s is the picture of Jesus that hung on the wall of our dining room. No matter where you sat at the dining room table Jesus’ eyes always seemed to follow you. Many of you may remember this picture of Jesus. It features only his upper torso. Jesus has sort of greenish brown eyes, European facial features, longing flowing brown hair, and he seems to be clothed in a white night gown. This Jesus of my childhood was everywhere and he could see everything. The ever watchful savior making a list and checking it twice to tell my parents if I was naughty or nice.

When I was sixteen years old I attended a youth conference in a nearby town and even though I had been raised in the church and baptized at least twice (once when my family joined and another time when I ‘rededicated my life to Christ’ during Vacation Bible School) there was something that happened on that youth trip which caused me to begin taking my relationship with Jesus more seriously and more personally. I agreed to give my heart to Jesus as my youth counselor quoted Revelation 3.20 to me: “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

Even though my feminist consciousness had not yet been raised, I understood that verse taken out of context from the King James translation of the Bible to apply to me. The image of Jesus standing at my heart’s door—often pictured with no door knob on the outside—would guide me into the early years of my college life. It was a tender image of intimacy, choice and change. I had chosen to turn the doorknob on the inside of the door to let Jesus into my heart, to open my life to be changed by this one who wanted to ‘sup’ with me.

Supping with Jesus led me to enroll as a religion major at a Baptist college in Louisiana. In my sophomore New Testament class my supping image of Jesus was replaced with a “search for the historical Jesus.” I remember feeling betrayed by my Sunday School teachers and my Baptist pastors for painting an ‘unhistorical’ portrait of Jesus that included Wise Men at the manger, when in reality they had showed up at Jesus’ house sometime after the birth. The foundation of my faith was shaken when I realized that the portraits of Jesus found in each of the canonical gospels (never mind all those other gospels that didn’t make the cut for political reasons) were remembrances of things Jesus said and did which had been shaped by a particular community’s religious, theological or political agenda.

I continued searching — off and on — for the historical Jesus as I entered The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY in 1980 as a closeted lesbian who wanted to complete a PhD in Old Testament studies and teach. My search for the historical Jesus got side tracked as I struggled to reconcile my sexuality with my spirituality—not realizing at the time that our embodied existence as God’s Beloved is the core of a feminist understanding of the Incarnation.

It was during my early seminary career that I started hearing the names and reading the works of feminists such as Mary Daly (who died just a few weeks ago) author of Beyond God the Father and Letty Russell who actually came to Southern Seminary and met with a group of women students to talk about feminist interpretations of the Bible.

My feminist consciousness was raised and grew as a result of my work with Biblical texts. The writings of feminist biblical scholars such as Phyllis Trible and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza exposed for me and others the ‘fiction’ of an objective and scientific biblical hermeneutic that in reality was the product of white heterosexist male Europeans. I learned feminist reading strategies that revised and corrected misogynist interpretations of biblical texts which did not take into account the historical and cultural settings or linguistics of passages that have been historically used to condemn women. I learned how to find out all that I could about women in the Bible in an effort to raise up examples of leadership, wisdom and cunning for women today. I learned how to name some biblical texts that do violence to women as ‘texts of terror’ and to approach them as well as most of scripture (which comes from a patriarchal culture) with a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion.’ I learned to imagine women in the stories of scripture and the history of the early church even if they were not mentioned specifically by name as part of a historical reconstruction that takes into account that women as one half of the human race have always been present in some way. (And I learned these things not from my white heterosexual male professors but in conversation with female students and attending presentations at the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, and continuing to read the works of those early feminist interpreters of the Bible such as Toni Craven, Judith Plaskow, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Katie Canon, Bernadette Brooten, Adela Yarbro Collins, Carolyn Osiek, Esther Fuchs…)

These learnings from feminist biblical criticism helped me to discover a Jesus quite different from the one of my childhood, adolescent and college years. Feminist biblical hermeneutics led me to feminist interpretations of Jesus.

One of the best summaries of feminist interpretations of Jesus I have found is in Lynn Japinga’s book Feminism and Christianity: The Essential Guide. In her book Japinga defines feminism as: “a commitment to the humanity, dignity, and equality of all persons. [Feminists] seek equal rights for women, but their ultimate goal is a social order in which women and men of all races and classes can live together in justice and harmony.” (p. 13) (Personally, I like the definition of feminism I saw on a bumper sticker a while back: “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”)

A primary question that feminists have explored is ‘can a male savior save women?’ Feminists point out that Jesus’ maleness has been misused to exclude women from the priesthood and full equality in society. (As one slogan from my seminary days stated: “If you can’t pee like Jesus you can’t be like Jesus.”)

Elizabeth Johnson notes, “[Jesus] sex is as intrinsic to his historical person as are his race, class, ethnic heritage, culture, his Jewish religious faith, his Galilean village roots, and so forth. The difficulty arises, rather, from the way this one particularity of sex, unlike the other historical particularities, is interpreted in sexist theology and practice. Consciously or unconsciously, Jesus’ maleness is lifted up and made essential…” (cited in Japinga, p.101)

So if we followed this line of reasoning / exclusion, then men who are not Jewish, Mediterranean or working class cannot be ministers or priests either. Feminists have pointed out that the saving significance of Jesus is not his maleness but his humanity.

Feminist theologians have realized that to call Jesus a ‘feminist’ based on his positive treatment of women in the New Testament stories about him is a bit anachronistic. And even though Jesus transgressed cultural taboos by talking to women (such as the Samaritan woman at the well), and religious taboos by confronting the accuser of the woman caught in adultery and telling her to ‘go and sin no more,’ feminists have pointed out that the Jesus of the New Testament did not actually challenge the structures of patriarchy and sexism and that his positive practices toward women did not take hold in the life of the early church.

Probably the most important work feminists have done in their interpretation of Jesus is to critique and revision theologies of the cross/atonement. Feminists have labeled the theological notion that Jesus’ death on the cross was God the Father’s required sacrifice to atone or pay for humanity sins as ‘divine child abuse.’ Instead, Rita Nakashima Brock claims, “Jesus’ death was tragic, but Jesus died, not because God demanded it as the price of reconciliation between God and humanity, but because his radical life threatened the religious and political powers of his time. His death was not God’s choice, and it was not required to ‘clean the slate’ and thereby enable God to love and accept sinful human beings.” (cited in Japinga, p. 121)

Feminists have not only challenged the doctrine of the atonement, but have revisioned it and Jesus in some positive ways.  Delores Williams emphasized the healing and teaching ministry of Jesus found in the gospels claiming that Jesus did conquer sin, not as a substitute on the cross but by the choices he made in his life—by resisting temptation in the wilderness and refusing to let evil forces determine his ministry. She cautions the women in her African American Christian tradition not to glorify the suffering of the cross and instead to imitate the life of Jesus.

Other feminists have revisioned Jesus’ death on the cross as a sign of solidarity with human suffering. Feminists who are women of color and women from the ‘two thirds world’ see Jesus as a ‘co-sufferer’ one who is with them in their slavery, oppression and poverty. These feminists emphasize that Jesus not only shares human suffering and in particular the suffering of women throughout the world, but transforms it into “an energizing force for social change.”

Related to this image of Jesus as co-sufferer is prophetic model of Jesus as liberator. Rather that seeing Jesus in a passive way as the heavenly savior of their souls, women who struggle for their own liberation and the liberation of others from oppressive structures and behaviors embody Jesus’ here on earth as liberator.

In the last year of my doctoral studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary I asked my major professor to write a letter of recommendation for a teaching job I was interested in. The first paragraph of my letter of recommendation praised a male colleague of mine. In the second paragraph my professor wrote, “If however, you are willing to consider a woman for this position, I recommend Mona West. She dresses nicely and has a nice speaking voice.”

I spent the next few years after graduate school feeling angry and betrayed and it was these feminist images of Jesus as ‘co-sufferer’ and ‘liberator’ that sustained me as I also made the journey to come out as a lesbian and leave Southern Baptist life. That part of my journey with Jesus led me to Metropolitan Community Church in the late 80’s.  As an out lesbian biblical scholar I have added to my feminist images of Jesus, Queer images as well.

What I discovered is that feminist contributions to theology and biblical studies paved the way for what Michael Foucault has called “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” The reading and revisionist strategies of feminists with regard to the Bible and Jesus opened the way for ‘womanist,’ ‘mujerista,’ ‘Asian,’ and ‘queer’ interpretations.

Feminist use of historical critical methodology and linguistics have helped queer biblical scholars to ‘correct’ homophobic mistranslations and misuse of what we have come to call the ‘clobber passages’ — those handful of verses in the Bible that reference same sex sexual activity.

Feminist use of imagination and social location have prompted queer biblical scholars to ‘out the Bible’ looking for clues that point to our spiritual ancestors in scripture such as Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, the Ethiopian Eunuch, Lydia the seller of purple, and yes Jesus himself as unmarried male who hangs out with his family of choice — Mary, Martha and Lazarus — and has a close relationship with the Beloved Disciple.

And while feminists have contributed in these ways to queer biblical hermeneutics which have lead to queer readings of Jesus, queer theory which resists binary notions of male and female, and heteronormativity, finds itself in conversation with feminist theory inviting a look at the ways in which gender and sexuality are socially constructed and performance based. And I am sure that BK Hipsher, Durrell Watkins, and Tom Bohache will say much more about all of that in their plenaries tomorrow!

The subtitle for this plenary is “reconciling a feminist hunger with a spiritual thirst.” My feminist hunger for “a social order in which women and men of all races and classes can live together in justice and harmony” has led me to reject images of Jesus that are exclusionary, ‘fixed,’ ‘white,’ ‘capitalist,’ ‘war mongering.’ And I am grateful for conferences like this one and scholars and teachers and writers like the ones we will hear this weekend who work to ‘redeem’ not necessarily those images of Jesus, but Jesus himself.

As real as my feminist hunger, is my spiritual thirst. I thirst for no less than union with the divine source of all life, which unites me with all that flows from this source. Jesus, for me, is not a savior to be worshipped, but a brother who shared that thirst for union with the source of all life. Whose actions of healing and liberation flowed from that thirst, as his words from the cross remind us.

Jesus life and example as one who embodied the Spirit—the divine source—available to all of us or Jesus as ‘spirit person’ as Marcus Borg has called him, is an image that guides me these days. Another image that speaks to me these days is the sacred heart of Jesus. In theologian Wendy Wright’s exploration of this rich tradition in Roman Catholic spirituality she claims from her own journey as a feminist who lost Jesus along the way, that he has emerged again for her in the form of the visual symbol of the Sacred Heart. She claims “that heart is an open, fleshy portal that invites us into the unfathomable lure of divine love—a fleshy window through which we might glimpse something of divine mystery and through which the divine mystery might gaze upon us.” (Sacred Heart: Gateway to God, p.xiv)

These days I find myself resonating with the words of Carter Heyward who claims that “to be faithful is to be spiritually hungry—for God and in God and with God and, in God’s own image, unable to be satisfied–to embody God’s yearning which is not yet, which keeps us longing and working toward justice and mutuality. It was in this God, in this desire, that Jesus as born and lived and died and lives among us to this day.” (Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right, p.22)