Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion

3. Returning God: The Gift of Feminist Theology

RETURNING GOD • 55 Three Returning God: The Gift of Feminist Theology Catherine Keller Doubling Back In Christian culture there is something menacing about a return, a second coming. The Lord should not have had to come twice. He was nice the first time, he tried love, he healed and fed us, and see what happened to him. We threw his gift in his face. The Book of Revelation warns us what a different mood he’ll be in when he comes again: he’s gonna kick some butt. The storm won’t stay in the desert this time, it rains shock and awe upon Babylon, that whore. Her beasts of terror are everywhere; this war must go to the ends of the earth. This return has eyes “like a flame”; its protruding tongue is hard, “a sharp twoedged sword.”1 Its very Word is a WMD. It will cut down the enemy empire. It will also penetrate and destroy the traitors within the churches , like that Jezebel, that woman who dares to lead and prophesy. “I am throwing her on a bed . . . ; and I will strike her children dead” [2:22]. Was she teaching too free a love? 55 5 56 • CATHERINE KELLER “Love” does occur positively in John’s Apocalypse: “I reprove and discipline those whom I love” [3:19]. The last letter of the New Testament thus compensates for the excessive love not just of Jezebel but of Jesus. And yet we have to admit that the difference between the love gospel and the apocalyptic rage, the différance of a love deferred, has been productive. That tense messianic expectation, charged with threat and hope, has driven , as Ernst Bloch demonstrated, all the revolutionary movements of the West.2 These include the movements of women such as the St. Simonniennes of the early nineteenth century, with whom Claire Demar founded a journal with other working class women announcing (in her capitals): “The word of the woman redeemer will be a supremely revolting word.”3 Indeed, the first religious icon that really got my attention (at age 16) was a bit of feminist apocalypse. It was a poster tacked up in a Massachusetts coffee shop, featuring a magnificent female with long red hair wearing a bearskin over one naked shoulder and holding a staff. The caption (capitalized, of course) read: god is coming, and is she pissed! The full force of the pronoun hit me for the first time and forever; I knew that She was pissed because He had usurped her place, He and his armies of butt-kickers. (I was spending time at anti-Vietnam demonstrations.) I did not know that Her Coming presaged the coming of feminist theology , let alone of my going to seminary to assist in Her return. Because the coming would not be ex nihilo; we sensed she’d been around before. She had tried love, she was nurturing, she fed and healed. And see what happened to her, to her incarnation in all women. Oh, the menace of her return was exciting: a second-wave feminist apocalypse, rocking with sex and rage. Of course, this returning she-God soon settled into more sober theological and ecclesial debates. But She never enjoyed unambiguous status , not even as a pronoun, not even within feminist theology. If feminist theology exists as such, if it is not just the residual oxymoron of an enthusiastic moment, it lives by the tolerance, the need, or the grace of theology. And so—problematically—of its institutionally durable, textually deep, and not altogether inflexible theos. The attempt to name ourselves thealogians was half-hearted. Its difference doesn’t preach any better than, say, the Heideggerian distinction between theology and theiology. And besides, no effort at feminization quite frees itself of patriarchal habit. How could it, after the millennia? Indeed, the specter of a female divinity has also provoked feminist ambivalence about RETURNING GOD • 57 any possible symbolic content, historical antecedent, fabricated image, or self-­ mirroring icon, let alone archetypal essence of femininity. Femininity projected to infinity—She spooked feminists almost as much as patriarchs . Feminist theological ambivalence wields its own double edge. So looking ahead and swinging back, I cannot hope to avoid the slashing tongued s/word of the apocalypse in this meditation. But we might elude its violence. Its double edge might morph into a wider and subtler question , that of an aporetic double genitive: the...