Reflections on Theology from an Anglo-Jewish Feminist Perspective

When asked if I would review Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow's book Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology, my first reason for agreeing to do so was one of gratitude. Quite apart from their respective books, Plaskow's classic article "The Right Question is Theological" (1983) and Christ's "Why Women Need the Goddess" (1978) laid the critical foundations of my academic career as a feminist theologian and scholar of religion.

I first came across these articles in 1990, close to a decade after I had finished my undergraduate studies. I was probably the first Jewish woman to be awarded a degree in Christian theology at Oxford, having applied in the hope that the course would be imbued with a sense of the numinous that had been notable only by its absence in my secular Jewish home. With a place at Trinity College, which had only begun to accept women a year before I arrived in 1980, I embarked on a degree that required me to read books about an exclusively male God, written only by men, and taught by exclusively male tutors. Despite occasional delicate references to my 'Jewish background' as if it were some obscurity of character that would be a kindness to overlook, it must be said that I usually felt genuinely welcome in the Faculty of Theology as a Jew and a young woman. It was only years later, after I began reading books and articles like those of Plaskow and Christ, that I began to realize why, throughout my three years at Oxford, I had felt "spacey and slightly ill," as Plaskow, in Goddess and God in the World, describes her own state of mind as a student of theology and religious studies. It was because, intellectually speaking, I had spent day after day in the sepulchral basement library of the Radcliffe Camera, doing a fine job of being an honorary male student, in the unremitting absence of something for which I had no concept: my own female voice.

Unlike Plaskow, who had first challenged the masculinization of God as a child of about nine. I had at no stage of my undergraduate (or postgraduate) philosophical and religious studies even noticed that God was represented as exclusively male in character, or that not one of my tutors was female, and not one of the texts I had studied was written by a woman. I was, of course, aware of secular feminist agitation for equal rights and had written at least one essay on Latin American liberation theology, conscious that my Oxford tutors had given the topic only the most scant and wary attention. But at no point had I been introduced to the pioneering religious feminist turn that Plaskow, Christ, and others had initiated a year or so before I went up to Oxford.

It was a postdoctoral appointment to teach Jewish and Christian theology and religious studies in a South Midlands university where my all-male colleagues were visibly relieved to be able to assign to me any module with 'women' in the title that brought Christ and Plaskow's work into my life. From then on, they were foremost among the scholars who equipped me to awaken nearly three decades of undergraduates to the absence and silence of women in the Abrahamic religious canons. Yet, using gender as a category of analysis, as they had done, I was also able to suggest that while traditional religion may be a root oppressor of women, where only men are the full normative subjects of their own religious experience, prophetic religions also

countermand the status quo. It is an engine of liberation not just for women but also for a whole spectrum of people whose sexuality has left them estranged from the patriarchal divine. This understanding of religion was Christ and Plaskow's genius and the gift that they and the other religious feminists of their generation bequeathed to all students of theology and...