Feminist theology arises out of women’s experience of oppression and discrimination in society. It is a form of liberation theology and concerns the liberation of women and of all people from all kinds of dominations and oppressions.
Feminist Theology
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Feminist theology seeks to provide a new human community based on the value of mutuality and reciprocity in the light of God’s promise of a new creation. They consider that traditional theology has been constructed to the exclusion of women’s experience and hence; has become male bias.
They believed that Christology is one of the doctrines most used to oppressed women. They seek to reinterpret it to uncover a more inclusive and significant understanding of Christ in relation to women’s experience.
Christology in Feminist theology
Feminist theologians hold that traditional Christology has taken the maleness of Jesus to be a presupposition for the maleness of God; and used it as a theological basis to hold that God should be imagined exclusively as male; or that only a male image provides a proper model for God.
They believed that when God, the highest power in the universe is the name or interpreted exclusively in male terms; an eventual implication follows that women are lesser images of God; or that they are naturally inferior to men. Similarly, in relation to Jesus’ maleness, the incarnation of the Logos of God as a male is traditionally interpret as an ontological necessity.
As a result, it has come to hold that just as God has to be incarnated in males, so only the male can represent Christ. In responding to this view Feminist theologians argued that God created both males and females in the divine image.
So, that neither male nor female is greater than the other in the divine image, nor can God be imagined exclusively either male or female. In their view, the maleness of Jesus is essentially a historical option, something analogous to his Jewish identity rather than ontological necessity.
Therefore, the maleness of Jesus cannot used as a theological basis for the subordination of women.
Jesus Christ in relation to Feminist theology
In their further discussion, Feminist theologians pointed out several liberation traditions from the Gospel that provide the basis for interpreting the significance of Jesus Christ in relation to women’s experience. The following are some of these traditions.
The prophetic vision of Jesus’ ministry
Feminist theologians pointed out the prophetic vision of Jesus’ ministry. They emphasize that in Jesus’ vision of the reign of God the established order of social, and religious hierarchy turned upside down. The last become the first and the first become the last.
It is the outcast and those of the periphery of the established structure who are counte first. As Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza puts it; “His announcement of eschatological reversal – many who are first will be last and those last will be first (Mk 10:31; Matt 19:30; 20:16; Lk 13:30) – applies also to women and to their impairment by patriarchal structure”. (Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 121).