From Logos to Christos: Essays on Christology in Honour of Joanne McWilliam

11 Neither Male nor Female: Christology beyond Dimorphism

11 Neither Male nor Female Christology beyond Dimorphism    PAMELA DICKEY YOUNG IAM DELIGHTED to be asked to write about Christology in a volume for Joanne McWilliam. The fact that Joanne’s theological views often differed from mine never meant that she was any less supportive of me as a person and as a scholar. I greatly appreciated her wisdom and her wry sense of humour in questioning ideas. I don’t expect she would agree with the position developed in this chapter, but I do know we would have had a good discussion about it, and I regret that this discussion will never take place. From the beginnings of second-wave feminist Christian theology, the maleness of Jesus was treated as an issue, and rightly so. The maleness of Jesus was used to justify and subordinate. That Jesus was male somehow meant singling out maleness as better than femaleness. Women could not be ordained because they did not model the body of Jesus down to its penis. Some churches claimed this not only as a man-made rule, but also as a divine sanction, for after all, God had chosen to become incarnate in a male, not in a female. Maleness was not only next to godliness but also itself the Incarnation of God. Therefore, maleness was the superior form of humanity and femaleness never quite attained normative status. Feminists saw the maleness of Jesus as a problem that had to be discussed. Now of course, this is not the whole story, and feminists in the 1980s and into the 1990s who saw something in the Christian tradition beyond its apparent sexism sought in a variety of ways to answer Rosemary 181 Ruether’s question: “Can a male savior save women?”1 Feminists who stayed in the Christian tradition sought a Christology beyond patriarchy, a Christology in which the maleness of Jesus was incidental rather than essential to the whole project. While those who left the tradition, or who could not find anything useful within it, understood the maleness of Jesus as more than a stumbling block—indeed, as a massive roadblock— those who stayed downplayed Jesus’ maleness. The maleness of Jesus was a stubborn fact, but it was not all there was to say about Jesus. And so we took refuge in finding the meaning of Jesus beyond or outside of his maleness. In this chapter I will return once more to the maleness of Jesus. Through the use of a theoretical lens informed by feminist and queer theories, I will read the maleness of Jesus not just as a useful tool for patriarchy but as the creation of patriarchy precisely to enforce a social structure of superordination and subordination. Maleness and femaleness are not so much stubborn facts as they are a way of thinking about the world. As I will argue below, the moment one accepts this sexual bifurcation or dimorphism as a given, not as a construction, a whole system of superiors and subordinates falls into place, whether we find that desirable or problematic and whether we seek to argue against that system or not.2 Questioning Sexual Dimorphism It has become an accepted part of the study of much Christian theology today to question the gender roles into which religious traditions often slot males and females and to criticize the ways in which those gender roles inscribe certain attitudes toward people on the basis of maleness and femaleness. We tend to see gender roles as social fabrications rather than as inherently given. We do not, for the most part, question our assumption that, however constructed our gender roles might be, they still depend on a notion of the bifurcation of humanity into male and female sexes and an ensuing view of sexual complementarity that relates men and women as opposite parts of one whole. When this notion of complementarity is invoked, it brings with it a system that devalues women in relation to men and that has no place for non-heterosexual relationships because they violate the notion of the complementary wholeness of male and female humanity. What would happen to christological studies if sex were a socially constructed category, parallel to the construction of gender? When I first pose this question to my students, many do not even understand the notion. 182 CHRISTOLOGY AND ETHICS They quickly retreat to biological arguments in the same way that the arguments against gay and lesbian...