CHAPTER 3

THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY

OF GENDER1

TINA BEATTIE

Theology was the highest of the disciplines—the queen of the sciences—in the medi­
eval universities. In these scholastic institutions, knowledge prayerfully gleaned from
scripture and patristic theology was rationally analysed and organized according to
the rediscovered texts of ancient Greek philosophy, science, and mathematics, with
Aristotle being the most influential source. Gender studies, on the other hand, is one
of the most recent disciplines to emerge in the proliferation of intellectual perspectives
that is characteristic of postmodernity (Lyotard [1979] 1984), a movement that might
eliminate the last traces of Christian Aristotelianism’s formative role in the making of
Western culture and ideas (D’Costa 2005; MacIntyre 2009; Turner 2013).
In the post-Enlightenment era, theology was displaced from its place ofpre-eminence,
first by philosophy and then by science. However, while the postmodern fragmenta­
tion of knowledge has challenged many academic disciplines and methods, it has left
unchallenged the resistance to theology inherent in post-Kantian epistemologies. As
Sarah Coakley observes, ‘gender studies... is predominantly secular and often actively
anti-theological in tone’ (Coakley 2009:2). The converse, however, is not true. Although
many theologians are resistant to issues of gender and sexuality, those who take such
questions seriously are among the most radical and intellectually rigorous of contempo­
rary theologians (see Loughlin 2007). Coakley goes so far as to argue that ‘only system­
atic theology (of a particular sort) can adequately and effectively respond to the rightful
critiques that gender studies and political and liberation theology have laid at its door.
And only gender studies, inversely, and its accompanying political insights, can thus
properly re-animate systematic theology for the future’ (2009: 2, emphasis original).
Elaborating upon the theological potential of gender awareness, Coakley (2013) argues
that modern theologians misread the emergent Trinitarian theologies of the fourth and

1 The ideas in this essay are elaborated more fully in Beattie (2006,2013).
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 33

fifth centuries, because they fail to recognize how intricately questions of God were
bound up with questions of desire, sexuality, and gender.
Sandra Lipsitz Bern refers to ‘the lenses of gender’ to describe how cultural constructs
perpetuate different concepts of gender which she describes as 'gender polarization,
androcentrism, and biological essentialism’ (1993: p. viii). Bern writes of the need to
‘render those lenses visible rather them invisible, to enable us to look at the cultures gen­
der lenses rather than through them’ (1993: 2, emphasis original). Theologians such as
Coakley explore the new perspectives that open up when we become aware of how the­
ology has been influenced by the invisible lenses of gender, and when we seek different
possibilities for the interpretation of gendered Christian doctrines and their anthropo­
logical, sacramental, and ethical applications by making those lenses visible (see also
D’Costa 2000).
This means approaching theology in the light of changing interpretations of gender
and sexual difference. The work of Thomas Laqueur (1990) is of particular relevance
here. Laqueur goes beyond Michel Foucault’s influential theories about the social con­
struction of sexuality and its associations with power and knowledge (Foucault [1976]
1998, [1984] 1992, [1984] 1990), to ask wide-ranging questions about pleasure, pain,
embodiment, and justice in the context of changing representations of sexual anatomy
and physiology in Western history.
Laqueur identifies two overlapping ‘masterplots’: a one-sex model found in
pre-modern texts in which the female body is understood as an inferior anatomical
variation on the male body, and a post-Enlightenment two-sex model in which bio­
logical differences are interpreted in terms of an essential physiological difference
between men and women. Laqueur argues that, in ‘pre-Enlightenment texts, and even
some later ones, sex, or the body, must be understood as the epiphenomenon, while
gender, what we would take to be a cultural category, was primary or “real” ’ (1990: 8,
emphasis original). Laqueur also argues that ‘Anatomy in the context of sexual differ­
ence was a representational strategy that illuminated a more stable extracorporeal real­
ity. There existed many genders but only one adaptable sex’ (1990: 35). We shall come
back to these claims when we look more closely at the theological construction of sexual
difference.
Despite the entrenched secularism of Anglo-American feminist theory and gender
studies (Beattie 1999), postmodernism constitutes a more hospitable environment
for theology than its modern antecedents. The shift away from modern metanarra­
tives about the universality of reason and the progressive nature of scientific know­
ledge (Kuhn [1962] 2012) towards more contextualized narratives creates a plurality
of intellectual spaces within which different cultural and religious ways of know­
ing can be accommodated, albeit by surrendering their claims to universality. This
makes it possible for theology to reclaim its own traditions and methods, beyond
the objectifying and rationalizing distortions of post-Enlightenment epistemologies.
My approach in this essay belongs within this postmodern perspective, which learns
from its secular counterparts but is not afraid to interpret their insights from the per­
spective of faith.
34 TINA BEATTIE

Feminism, Gender Studies, and the

Linguistic Turn

The paradigmatic shift from modern empirical or rationalist approaches to knowledge

towards the more narrative and contextual approaches associated with postmodernism
entails an emphasis on the formative influence of language on the construction of know­
ledge and subjectivity. Linguistic theories displace epistemological claims rooted in the
rationalism of the knowing subject, or in empirical descriptions of the material world
(Vanhoozer 2003; Ward [2001] 2005; Weeks 2011). This is sometimes referred to as the
linguistic turn’, and it is the context within which gender studies must be situated.
Rejecting any realist claims about the significance of sexuality and gender which appeal
to essential sexual characteristics or anatomical differences, this approach draws on
resources such as psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, feminism, linguistics, post-structuralism,
and post-colonial theory, as well as the evolutionary, social, and behavioural sciences, to
explore how questions ofgender identity are deeply influenced by dominant cultural norms
(see Chopp and Davaney 1997; Tong 2009). Rather than being a divinely given or naturally
occurring feature of the biologically sexed body, the linguistic concept of gender is shown
to play a formative role in the construction of ideas about subjectivity and personhood,
in the formation of ethics, in the attribution of roles and characteristics to different sexes,
and in the political organization of social and domestic hierarchies and institutions. That is
why gender studies belongs within the broadly defined approach to knowledge known as
‘deconstructionl Gender theorists and feminists argue that culturally constructed hetero­
sexual characteristics and relationships are elevated to a normative status by denying the
fluctuating and diverse spectrum of human sexuality, identity, and desire. This results in the
hierarchical ordering of the sexes and the exclusion or marginalization of those who fail to
conform to the binary heterosexual norms and hierarchies that undergird the social order.
Gender studies emerged from the feminist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Like their secular counterparts, feminist theologians were concerned with the religious,
political, and social subordination and exclusion of women. They sought to correct this
by drawing on women’s experiences and perspectives to challenge the androcentrism
and patriarchy of Christian theology and ethics, and to draw attention to the neglected
presence of women in the Bible and in the making of Christian history and theology.
Rosemary Radford Ruether explains this privileging of women’s experience in her pio­
neering book, Sexism and God-Talk ([1983] 1992.):

' > use of the criterion of experience

The uniqueness of feminist theology lies not in its
but rather in its use of women’s experience, which has been almost entirely shut out
of theological reflection in the past. The use of women’s experience in feminist the­
ology, therefore, explodes as a critical force, exposing classical theology, including
its codified traditions, as based on male experience rather than on universal human
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 35

experience. Feminist theology makes the sociology of theological knowledge visible,

no longer hidden behind mystifications of objectified divine and universal authority.
([1983] 1992:13, emphasis original; see also Hogan 1995)

Ruether argues that the ‘critical principle’ for feminist theology is ‘the promotion of
the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity
of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive’, whereas ‘what does promote the
full humanity of women is of the Holy’ ([1983] 1992:18-19).
However, this concept of‘woman’ soon came under scrutiny. The ‘woman’ whose full
humanity was being affirmed and whose experiences were being validated and given
scholarly authority was, in the eyes of many critics, white, liberal, middle class, and het­
erosexual (Fulkerson 1994; Kamitsuka 2007). A wide range of contextualized feminist
voices soon began to speak from positions of otherness in ways which undermined the
concept of‘woman’ as a singular theoretical category and political subject (King 1994;
Pui-lan 2005). This exposed profound and enduring tensions between the feminist quest
for justice, which requires some universal or normative claims about women, and rec­
ognition of the diversity of women’s identities, aspirations, and experiences which defies
such universalization. The linguistic turn has prompted ongoing debate as to whether it
constitutes the abandonment of the liberative praxis entailed in the feminist theological
struggle for justice in favour of more fashionable but less politically engaged theoretical
discourses associated with secular academia (Marla et al. 1999).
This process of constructing and then deconstructing ‘woman’ went hand in hand
with the attempt to disentangle the relationship between sex and gender, in order to
put a critical distance between the biologically sexed body and the gendered mean­
ings attributed to that body through cultural and linguistic constructs (Ortner 1972).
However, dichotomies between sex and gender/nature and culture began to dissolve
under the deconstructive gaze, on the basis of the argument that ‘sex’ and ‘nature’ are
no less linguistic constructs than ‘gender’ and ‘culture’ (Butler [1990] 1999). Language
maps the biological body with the contours and symbols of socially encoded sexual con­
structs, and we cannot meaningfully extricate the material givenness of sex—the ‘real’
body—from language. The linguistic turn leads to the realization that we inhabit a world
that is interpreted through and through, and whatever material realities exist beyond
that process of interpretation remain incomprehensible to us in and of themselves.
Although it appears in new guise in postmodern theory, this awareness of the aporia
between consciousness and materiality and the perplexity to which it gives rise has its
origins in much earlier philosophical and theological musings on the nature of the rela­
tionship between body and soul, matter and mind. These arguably reach their modern
apotheosis in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose refusal to accept the legitimacy
of concepts based on metaphysical claims to knowledge has had a formative influence
on the making of secular modernity with its rationalist and empiricist underpinnings.
However, while earlier generations sought to overcome the perceived gap between
mind and matter through various theological and philosophical appeals to the uni­
versality of God or reason in the formation of knowledge and the discovery of truth,
 36 TINA BEATTIE

postmodernists—including gender theorists—seek to unmask the ideologies of power

which they see at work in all attempts to explain the world in terms of any universal
truth. From this perspective, language serves not to express truths we discover in an
intrinsically meaningful universe, but rather to conform human knowledge and identity
to social conventions and laws, maintaining political and sexual hierarchies through the
linguistic dynamics of control, exclusion, and negation. Postmodern theorists resist any
attempt to fill the ontological void with claims to knowledge or truth based either on
rationality and science or on theology and metaphysics. Language itself takes the place
of a meaningful cosmos, and the silent abyss takes the place of God.
Postmodern thinkers are concerned with exploring the ways in which the knowing
subject is susceptible to unconscious social and psychological influences encrypted
within the linguistic structure, which serve both to maintain and disrupt the hierar­
chies, gendered identities, and claims to knowledge of the established order through the
complex interwoven and interdependent dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, for
example, sexual difference would be interpreted not in terms of two equal but different
sexes, but in terms of‘woman’ as lack and negativity in relation to the positive character­
istics of subjectivity and normativity associated with ‘man’. Gender theorists seek to dis­
mantle such binary logic in order to bring into play a wider range of gendered meanings
and possibilities, by deconstructing the rational masculine ‘I’ of the modern symbolic
order and his excluded, feminized others.

Gender and Sexual Difference

The gender dualism implicit in Western ways of knowing can be traced back to Greek
philosophical concepts of paternal form and maternal matter, and their influence on
early and medieval theology. From this perspective, material beings exist by way of a
copulative encounter between inseminating paternal form and receptive maternal
matter. Jacques Lacan argues that these ancient copulative ontologies are perpetuated
in post-Christian modernity through the structures of language, so that the symbolic
order which constitutes the rationalized linguistic sphere of society’s institutions, laws,
and values constitutes the paternal form, and the imaginary or unconscious is redolent
with the primordial unformed desires and fears associated with maternal matter (Beattie
2013). This constitutes the linguistic perpetuation of the one-sex model described by
Laqueur, for when sexual difference is organized around relationships of perfection and
lack (associated in Lacanian psychoanalysis with the Phallus as the veiled placeholder
once occupied by God in the ordering of knowledge), there is no true difference. This
leads to Lacan’s controversial assertion that there is no sexual relationship (Lacan 1999),
an assertion challenged by Luce Irigaray who argues that sexual difference needs to find
linguistic expression in order to allow for the full subjectivity of women as different from
men, rather than as ‘the other of the same’ who serves to define masculine subjectivity
by functioning as its negated other (Irigaray 1985a, 1985b, 1993)-

3
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 37

Julia Kristeva takes a more nuanced Freudian/Lacanian approach, arguing that

rather than seeking the linguistic reformation of culture around the morphology of
sexual difference, we need to recognize that sexual difference is a cultural projection
of the division of the psyche around the dynamics of love and abjection associated with
the Oedipal process. This constitutes the necessary split within the consciousness of a
linguistic species (the human) in which separation from the primordial state of union
associated with the maternal body is the condition for our entry into culture and lan­
guage (Kristeva [1980] 1982, [1983] 1987). Kristeva turns to the maternal body rather
than the sexual body as a site of possible signification in which the ambiguity of self and
otherness, body and language, might be expressed beyond the dualisms and repressions
of modern sexual essentialisms ([1983] 1987: 234-263; see also Battersby 1998).
Lacan has had a considerable influence on psychoanalytic theories of gender and sexual
difference, particularly in the work of Irigaray and Kristeva and, through them, on post­
modern theology. However, the most significant pioneer in the field of gender studies is
American cultural theorist and philosopher Judith Butler (Butler 1993 [1990] 1999; Armour
and St Ville 2006). Butlers work is dedicated to dismantling the edifice of sexual difference
and the identities and political structures that it sustains, by disruptive textual performances
of gender that open into multiple gendered identities and subject positions. This parodic
mimesis of gendered pluralities exposes the constructed nature of essential heterosexual­
ity, and lays bare its relationship to power within a social order that seeks to divide and rule
its subjects/citizens through the control of sexual subjectivities and desires. Summarizing
Butler’s arguments, theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson (1999:193) writes:

As a dominant ordering of reality, compulsory heterosexuality regulates pleasure

and bodies; it cuts up reality into two human identities and defines how they may
legitimately experience.... [D]esire is channelled and defined by the sexes it con­
nects; and those sexes are two—male and female. Any thinking about desire and
human relations is locked into this grid; any subject which does not conform is
disciplined.

However, even this radically deconstructive approach has been called into ques­
tion by the realization that gender is only one of many characteristics that contrib­
ute to the social positioning of the self. Questions of gendered identity have become
enmeshed in the tangled intersections of race and ethnicity, class, sexual orientation,
ability and disability, post-colonial perspectives, cultural affiliations, etc.—leading to
the term ‘intersectionality’ as a discourse that approaches questions of subjectivity, jus­
tice, and politics within these complex and volatile markers of identity and otherness
(Yuval-Davis 2011).
Any theologian who seeks to engage with this proliferation of theories must contend
with a sometimes blinding array of claims and counter-claims, with complex ethical and
political questions of identity politics, human rights (including sexual and reproductive
rights), and discourses of alterity and heterogeneity in relation to the dominant cultural
discourses of our time. Some might ask why theologians should engage with an often
confused and confusing theoretical quest which is so resistant to their insights, and
38 TINA BEATTIE

which sometimes tells us more about the narcissism of academics than about the lived,
realities of ordinary’ human lives.
I would argue with Coakley that the study of gender draws theology back to its
neglected roots, opening up new insights and interpretations. The linguistic turn,
involving as it does the rediscovery of the power of language to shape the world, can
be interpreted as a call to rediscover the forgotten wisdom of the Christian theological
tradition and, even if the invitation is spurned, to hold out to gender theorists the possi­
bility of a dialogue with theology with regard to questions of transcendence, materiality,
hope, and meaning. So let me turn to some of the key issues and debates that have arisen
through the introduction of gender as a lens for theological and biblical reflection and
analysis, beginning with the reaction of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Essentializing Sex

The most theologically developed resistance to gender theorv has come from the
Catholic magisterium and a movement known as ‘theologv of the body'. This was
inspired by a series of reflections on the Book of Genesis given bv Pope John Paul II
between 1979 and 19S0 (1979-1980, 2006; West [2003] 2007), and it has generated an
influential following among some North American theologians in particular. A number
Catholic women theologians has welcomed this initiative and has sought to develop
it in the form of a ‘new feminism’ (Schumacher 2004), in response to John Paul H’s call
to promote a "new feminism” which rejects the temptation ofimiraring models of “male
domination’, in order to acknowledge and athrm the true genius of women in every
aspect of the lite of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation’
■onn Paul II 1995b: Z99). These ‘new feminists' are generally hostile to secular feminism
.Seattle 2006) and defend the Church's official teachings on contraception, abortion,
homosexuality, and marriage. 'Theology of the bodv' is almost exclusively concerned
with the sexual and reproductive body, and has little to say about how bodies are also'
arected bv economic and political systems.
'anet Martin Soskice points to the striking contrast between what she refers to as the:
sexual ’monoculture” (2007: 4s) that informed Catholic theological anthropology up1
s.' ar.d including the Vatican 11 document GuuJium er Spes, and the 2004 letter issued by
the magistenuni and addressed to Catholic bishops. On the Collaboration of Men and
Wor.wn in the Church and the World' (CBV 2004). I hat letter refers to sexual difference:
as Twionging ontologically to creation' (l'Bl:2004:A similar claim is made in John.
Paul Il’s'I etter to Women' (1995a) when he claims that 'Womanhood and manhood are
complemcntan not on/v the plivsi«.il <<n.l psi\9ioi.\pcul jvinis etiw, but also from
the onr.Wtsci.ul (1995a: S7. emphasis original). While stopping short of claiming that sex­
ual difference is itself ontological, such claims represent a shift in Catholic anthropol­
ogy-- from the predominantly one-sex model described be I aqueur. to a two-sex model
shaped bv modern biology and romantic sexual stereotypes.
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 39

This emphasis on sexual difference can be understood as a reaction against theological

campaigns for women’s ordination, and political campaigns for women’s reproductive
rights (Beattie 2009, 2010). The authors of the 2004 CDF letter had some understanding
of gender theory, for they associate the struggle for women’s equality with a tendency to
minimize ‘physical difference, termed sex,... while the purely cultural element, termed
gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary’ (CDF 2004: $2, emphasis
original). The desire to liberate women from ‘biological determinism’ inspires ‘ideologies
which... call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and
father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model
of polymorphous sexuality’ (CDF 2004: ft2). Despite the title of this letter, it says nothing
about the contribution of men to either conflict or collaboration between the sexes, but
focuses exclusively on the challenges and antagonisms of women and gender politics.
Paradoxically then, the Catholic magisterium has agreed with gender theorists that
heterosexual gender roles constitute the bedrock upon which society is constructed,
so that to fundamentally change these roles would be to radically undermine the sta­
tus quo.2 For conservatives, this poses an apocalyptic threat to modern Western cul­
ture. For postmodernists, it offers liberation from oppressive heterosexist norms which
sustain cultures of exclusion, inequality, and violence. I want to suggest that neither of
these approaches is sufficiently nuanced to offer an adequate theological account of the
human body in a graced creation, but first let me turn to questions of gender in the Bible.

Gender and the Bible

Whereas Catholic theology appeals to natural law, tradition, and magisterial author­
ity as well as scripture, evangelical theology is more biblically focused. Elaine Storkey
points out that ‘As both the shaper of a worldview, and as a moral and spiritual guide for
personal and communal life, the Bible unites evangelicals and remains the key source of
understanding for their faith’ (2007:164). However, she describes the North American
debate about gender as being ‘polarized between complementarians’ and ‘egalitarians,’
each claiming biblical justification for their position (‘biblical manhood and woman­
hood’ versus ‘biblical equality’) (2007:165; see also Storkey 2000). Storkey appeals for
the renewal of Trinitarian theology as a way of appreciating the significance of human
relatedness for our understanding of gender, and for a recognition of the extent to which
the life and teachings of Jesus challenged the patriarchal culture of his time—a claim
which is not unproblematic in terms of its representation of first-century Jewish cul­
ture (see Kraemer 1998). Storkey offers an alternative to the traditional gender roles
supported by more conservative evangelicals (Gallagher 2003; Kostenberger and Jones
[2004] 2010).

2 At the time of writing, Pope Francis’s papacy might signal a shift in Catholic gender politics, but it is
too early to know.
40 TINA BEATTIE

The first three chapters of Genesis are fundamental to the Christian understanding of
sex and gender across denominational and historical boundaries, and indeed they remain
an indispensable resource for anybody seeking to understand Western attitudes to sexu­
ality and gender. From the beginning of the theological tradition the story of creation has
been the lens through which gender has been interpreted, and the story of Adam and Eve
in Genesis 2 has been accorded greater significance than that of the creation of male and
female in the image of God in Genesis 1 (Borressen [1991] 1995b; Coakley 1997 and 2002).
The account of creation and the fall in Genesis 2 and 3 has been almost universally
interpreted to legitimate the subordination of women to men, based on the argument
that Eve was created after Adam, she was described as his handmaid, and she was the first
to yield to temptation (Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler 1999). Theologians have also tradi­
tionally differentiated between the hierarchical ordering of the sexes which was part of
the original goodness of the order of creation, and the marital domination and maternal
suffering experienced by women which is a consequence of original sin. This has led
to the argument that, while men and women are equal in the order of redemption, the
hierarchical relationship between the sexes is part of God’s intention for the good order­
ing of creation and the human relationships and institutions within it (Borressen [1968]
1995a). The oppression of women by men is a consequence of sin and has no place in
Christian communities, but the subordination of women to male authority is intended
by God (Kostenberger and Jones [2004] 2010).
However, there are different points of view as to the eschatological significance of sex­
ual difference in the body-soul union of the person. The Western tradition has followed
Augustine in believing that the creation of sexed humanity in Genesis is an eternal char­
acteristic of the human creature. The resurrected body will retain its sexual character­
istics. Both sexes participate in the fall through the actions of Adam and Eve, and in
the incarnation and redemption through the participation of Christ and Mary (the New
Adam and the New Eve) (Louth 1997; Beattie 2002).
The Orthodox tradition has tended towards a more contingent theology of sexual dif­
ference, seeing it as a secondary rather than a primary characteristic of what it means
to be human (Ware 1997; Coakley 2002). God created the sexes in anticipation of the
fall and death coming into creation, so that reproduction would become necessary to
maintain the species in a post-lapsarian world. In this tradition, the risen body will not
be sexually differentiated, though feminist theologians point out that there is an orienta­
tion towards androcentrism in these ostensibly non-sexed accounts of the resurrected
body (Borresen [1991] 1995b).
In her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978), Phyllis Trible poses one of the
most influential challenges to traditional interpretations of Genesis. Through a close
reading of the ‘liturgy of creation’ (Trible 1978:12) in Genesis 1, she shows that the crea­
tion of male and female in ‘the image of God’ denotes both likeness and difference, and
invites the use of male and female metaphors to express this—though this equality is
obscured by the fact that ‘the Bible overwhelmingly favors male metaphors for deity’
(1978: 23). She reads Genesis 2-3 as ‘A love story gone awry’ (1978: 72), arguing that the
Hebrew account does not support the canonical reading of the text which ‘proclaims
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 41

male superiority and female inferiority as the will of God’ and ‘portrays woman as
‘temptress’ and troublemaker who is dependent upon and dominated by her husband’
(1978: 73). Instead, Trible argues that the emergence of sexual difference is part of the
process of creation which begins with the creation of the divinely dependent and ‘sexu­
ally undifferentiated earth creature’ ('adam) (1978: 80) from the earth (ha-adamd), with
sexual difference occurring simultaneously with the creation of the woman, and the
introduction of the words female and male (‘issa and ‘is).
Trible’s interpretation has been challenged (Bal 1985; Gellman 2006), but she forms
part of a growing scholarly movement, again originating with the questions that
feminism posed to biblical studies from the late 1960s and now extending across a
range of studies of gender and sexuality in the Bible (Sawyer 2002; Guest et al. 2006).
The creation narratives in Genesis continue to provide a focal point for postmodern
theologians seeking doctrinally faithful, biblically inspired approaches to such ques­
tions. The account of the goodness of creation and of the human male and female
made in the image of God requires a delicate balancing act between the affirmation
of sexual difference as part of that original goodness, and the recognition that this
difference offers itself as a resource for imagining a variety of ways in which gender
expresses our capacity for personal maturing and deepening relationality. Soskice
(2007: 49) argues that the account of the creation of male and female in the image of
God in Genesis 1:27 affirms

that all human beings are in the divine image, and that sexual difference has some­
thing to tell us about God and about ourselves.... The as yet unsung glory of Gen.
1:26-7 is that the fullness of divine life and creativity is reflected by a human race
which is male and female, which encompasses if not an ontological then a primal
difference.

However, this brings me to a difference between Protestant and Catholic approaches

to creation, the Bible, and revelation, which has a subtle but important influence on the­
ologies of gender.

Scripture, Sacramentality, and Desire

The linguistic turn has prompted a shift away from historical-critical methods of biblical
scholarship towards more narrative approaches, in which the texts are interpreted not
in terms of their objective historical meaning but as the unfolding story of faith within
Jewish and Christian communities (Frei 1993; Loughlin 1996). This shift is evidence of
the extent to which postmodernism restores to Christian scholarship some of its own
forgotten insights about reading and interpreting texts. As many theologians point out,
the pre-modern approach to the Bible was more linguistically nuanced than its modern
counterparts. In patristic and medieval theology, the scriptures opened into ever-deeper
meanings and mysteries by way of metaphor and allegory, and literal readings ultimately
42 TINA BEATTIE

yielded to more mystical interpretations. Thomas Aquinas explains that scripture is

the self-revelation of the mystery of God, so that it constitutes a concealing as well as a
revealing. This means, says Thomas, that ‘the manner of its speech transcends every sci­
ence, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery’
(Summa Theologiae I.1.10, quoted in Beattie 2013: 57-58).
This mystery is, in the Catholic sacramental tradition, a weaving together of nature
and grace, reason and revelation, into a single harmonious symphony of creation
orchestrated by desire for God and held in being by the active love of God. This ‘sac­
ramental imagination (Hilkert [1997] 2006) has always found expression in Catholic
liturgy, art, literature, and music, but it also informs the politicized and historically con­
textualized perspectives of liberationist and feminist theologies, for the God of scripture
is the God of nature and of history. Our capacity to enter more deeply into knowledge
of God is understood in terms of the continuity of grace with nature, rather than as a
rupture between the two—in the words of Thomas, grace perfects nature’ (Summa
Theologiae I.62.5, quoted in Beattie 2013:40).
Protestant theology tends to have a more radical account of the dis-gracing of
nature through the effects of original sin, so that the ‘sacramental imagination’ of the
Catholic tradition is sometimes contrasted with the ‘dialectical imagination’ exempli­
fied by Reformed theologians such as Karl Barth. In Mary Hilkert’s summing-up of
Barth’s position, ‘There can be no continuity between revelation and creation since cre­
ation as destroyed by sin reveals only God’s “no.” The hidden God (Deus absconditus') of
Christian revelation can never be discovered directly in human history or experience,
both of which are deeply scarred by sin’ ([1997] 2006: 21; see also Jones 1993). From this
perspective, the cross is a scandal which radically interrupts history and stands over and
against nature, with no evident continuity between the order of nature and the trans­
formative and redeeming power of grace.
It would be wrong to draw a rigid distinction between these two approaches, for they
weave through Catholic and Protestant theologies in different ways. Nevertheless, they
shape different theological approaches to questions of gender, as can be seen if we briefly
consider Nancy Dallavalle’s criticism of Fulkerson’s Reformed theology of gender, from
the perspective of a Catholic sacramental account of creation.
Fulkerson is one of the most radically deconstructive theologians of gender in her
close engagement with Foucault, and her work is a rich resource for understanding the
theological potential of gender theory. In her book Changing the Subject (1994), she
argues that feminist theologians have been insufficiently attentive to the ways in which
power operates through the subtle dynamics of inclusion and exclusion which consti­
tute the academic production of knowledge. Fulkerson seeks a new method for feminist
theology, in which the story of Jesus becomes a narrative enacted in different communi­
ties in a way that destabilizes the subject and entails ‘the loss of a fixed notion of human
nature’ (1994: 393-394). This calls for a ‘theological politics of respect for difference’
through participation in ‘communities that transgress gender hierarchies’ (1994: 394)-
The implications of this are explored in a later essay in which Fulkerson appeals for a
theological grammar that is iconoclastic in its refusal ‘to require binary gendered
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 43

identity’ as a condition of‘access to the status of child of God’ (1999:199). In its place, she
appeals for a

radical love... displayed in a community whose relations of respect, forgiveness,

confession, accountability and agape toward the stranger are made available without
conditions... Radical love is invoked in the community to support a reality where
there is neither slave nor free, male nor female in Christ Jesus, a reality defined by a
grammar ofjustification by faith alone.
(Fulkerson 1999:198-199)

Dallavalle compares the ethical emphasis on justice in feminist theologies, with

the emphasis on creation in Catholic sacramental theology (1998b). She argues that
Fulkerson’s critique of feminism is ‘shaped by her own Reformed tradition’s position of
“iconoclasm” with regard to creation’, which is, she argues, ‘foreign (not “heresy”) to both
the Catholic tradition of finding biological sexuality to be theologically significant and
the Catholic sacramental sensibility’ (Dallavalle 1998a: 41). Dallavalle calls for a ‘critical
essentialism’ which ‘brings the important insights of gender theory into a deeper and
more mutually critical conversation with the profound resonance of biological sexual­
ity in the Catholic theological tradition’ (1998a: 24), based on acceptance of the fact that,
however much men and women have in common, ‘we live our lives not ‘embodied’ gener­
ically, but as male and female’ (1998a: 33). The doctrine of creation, interpreted within the
unfolding life of the Church, invites us to ‘continue to plumb the mystery of biological
sexuality as “holy work” ’, constituting ‘an interpretative act by creation on creation’ by
way of the ‘ongoing polyphony of creation and tradition and economy’ (1998a: 39).
The idea of ‘critical essentialism’ has been questioned by those who see it as lend­
ing support to more conservative theories of biological determinism and sexual dual­
ism (Abraham 2009), but Dallavalle’s critique serves as a reminder that there are limits
to deconstruction. Ultimately we cannot escape the particularity of the body with its
sexual functions and gendered encryptions. From a sacramental perspective these
are not repressive social impositions which violate the freedom of the self, but can be
interpreted as a divine invitation to inhabit the freedom and mystery of life in God’s
graced creation. It is one thing to acknowledge with Fulkerson that ‘notions of inner
sexual identity and the accompanying matrix that routes and normalizes desire from
gendered identity are historically constructed’ (1999:198). but it is another to suggest
that we are able to break free of all such historical constructs which confer our identi­
ties upon us and weave us into society. The challenge is not to wriggle free of all such
constructs, for to do that would be to lapse into some primordial, non-linguistic con­
dition of animality. It is rather to ask how our unique positioning within creation as
‘rational animals’ (see Beattie 2013:71) made in the image of the relational, Trinitarian,
and Incarnate God enables us to navigate a creative path of limited and fragile free­
dom between the body’s grace and vulnerability, and the spirit’s capacity to liberate our
bodies into love, or to surrender them to the enslavement of obsessive and destructive
desires.
44 TINA BEATTIE

This means attending to the wounded aspects of desire, which Christianity refers to
in terms of original sin. There is a fundamental difference between secular anthropology
and theological anthropology concerning the nature of desire. In theological terms, desire
for God is the origin and end of all desire, and only when we understand this are we free
to enjoy the more transient and finite objects of desire that constitute our earthly needs,
pleasures, and relationships (Beattie 2013: 71-85). Original sin constitutes a fundamental
distortion of the goodness of our desire for God, so that we develop obsessive attachments;
to and cravings for objects that distract us from the love of God and neighbour.
However, feminist theologians argue that the Christian understanding of sin
needs to be analysed in terms of gender. Valerie Saiving’s i960 essay, ‘The Human
Situation: A Feminine View’ introduced a gendered perspective into theological
accounts of sin, in a way that anticipates later constructivist theories of gender. Resisting
any appeal to essential sexual differences, Saiving argues that women are psychologically
conditioned to greater relationality, love, and dependence than men, originating in the
maternal relationship. The anxiety that arises as a result of separation from the mother
makes men vulnerable to sin understood in terms of‘pride, will-to-power, exploitation,
self-assertiveness, and the treatment of others as objects rather than persons’ (Saiving
i960:107). Women, on the other hand, might face the temptation of‘specifically femin­
ine forms of sin’ (i960:108), associated with ‘underdevelopment or negation of the self’
(i960:109).
Feminist theologians have developed Saiving’s insights (Douglas et al. 2012), and have
also drawn on the work of psychologists such as Carol Gilligan (1982) to construct a
gendered theology of sin. However, the texts of medieval mysticism also provide a rich
resource for exploring how gendered concepts of relationality inform the language of
sin and grace, desire, and alienation, in the expression of human yearning for God.

Gender and Mysticism

Grace Jantzen’s book, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995) was one of the first
to bring feminist analysis to bear on the concept of mysticism. Challenging accounts of
mysticism as an intense subjective experience of God, Jantzen engages with Foucault to
argue that mysticism is a social construct that must be analysed in terms of gendered
power relations which were used to control and exclude women. Other studies have
offered a more nuanced and closely contextualized approach, drawing on a range of
theoretical perspectives to cast new light on the complex gendering of mystical texts in
their historical contexts (Hollywood 2002).
The linguistic style associated with medieval mysticism gains much of its poetic qual­
ity from an appreciation of the potency of metaphors of gender to communicate the
mysterious and dynamic relationship between creation and God. Barbara Newman
observes that ‘The permutations of gender in mystical texts, and among mystics them­
selves, are endlessly interesting’ (2013:54). However, she cautions that mystical language
expresses an intimate personal relationship between the human ‘I’ and the divine ‘Thou’,
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 45

and these direct personal pronouns only become gendered when they are translated
into a third-person account:

As soon as the third person intervenes, the I-Thou relationship becomes a story
about He-and-I or I-and-She. It is this necessary, but distorting gap between the
experience of relationship and the language of narration that gives gender, fascinat­
ing though it is, more prominence than most mystics would say it deserves.
(Newman 2013:54)

We find clear examples of this if we read the dialogical voices of women mystics in
works such as Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, in which the author adopts a range of nar­
rative voices to express the relationship between the bodily self, the soul, and God. The
soul is the feminized other in relation to the mystical body of Christ and the Church,
and the T is the bodily narrator who observes this relationship without ever being able
to plumb its depths or say what it means. The soul encounters God in rapture, but the
first-person narrator claims to have no understanding of this experience:

And what shall I say? I will stutter, ‘A-a,’ because there is nothing else I know how to
say. Finite language cannot express the emotion of the soul who longs for you infi­
nitely. .. I say only, my soul, that you have tasted and seen the abyss of supreme eter­
nal providence.
(Catherine of Siena 1980:325-326)

Yet this ecstatic union between the soul and God means nothing unless it animates
the body to love and serve God in the body of the neighbour, for that is where God is
truly to be found. God tells Catherine that ‘love of me and love of neighbor are one and
the same thing: Since love of neighbor has its source in me, the more the soul loves me,
the more she loves her neighbors’ (Catherine of Siena 1980: 86). Catherine offers a lav­
ish example of a nuptial theology of erotic delight in the mystical body of Christ, with a
passionate and highly politicized commitment to minister to the human body in all its
suffering and need, and to cry out for justice in the Church (Beattie 2013:364-387).
The nuptial language of Christian mysticism is inspired by the Song of Songs, which
was interpreted by Origen in the third century in terms of the soul’s quest for God.
This sowed the seeds for the flowering of the Canticle in Christian mystical writings
from the eleventh century (Astell and Cavadini 2013; see also Trible 1978). Although
post-Reformation interpreters of the Bible often fought shy of the explicit eroticism of
the Canticle, medieval theologians and artists appropriated its lush imagery of erotic
love to express the relationship of the soul and/or the Church as bride with Christ the
bridegroom, with the Virgin Mary often featuring as a motif of the perfection of this
relationship. Images of erotic desire were used interchangeably with images of maternal
nurture, so that the mystical body of Christ becomes a polymorphous source of desire,
consolation, and joy variously associated with the masculinized eroticism of the bride­
groom, the mothering presence of the Church, and the nurturing body of the Eucharist
(Bynum 1991).
46 TINA BEATTIE

In that sense, the mystics knew what deconstructionists have rediscovered about
how language provides the means for its own liberation from the dualisms and binaries
that trap our imaginative possibilities and prevent us from becoming other than we are.
However, they repeatedly warn against a solipsistic revelling in contemplative delight
for its own sake, because the love that is experienced in contemplation or divine union
must always find material expression in love of neighbour and care for the poor.

Redeeming Gender

Here we encounter the most significant difference between postmodern theories of gen­
der and the language of classical Christian theology and devotion. The gendered dis­
courses of postmodern theory often have little purchase on the material realities and
experiences of ordinary people and show little ethical concern for those who are too
young, too old, or simply too caught up in the grinding needs of survival to participate
in the gendered parodies of postmodern metrosexuals.
Paradoxically, what theology might bring to this discussion is not the language of
eternity and metaphysics, but the language of materiality and incarnation. Finitude,
mortality, and creaturely embodiment constitute the human condition, and set limits
to what we can achieve in terms of our capacity to transform imaginative possibilities
into existential realities. Christian theologians have been repeatedly seduced by vari­
ous forms of Manichaeism and philosophical dualism in which matter is condemned
as meaningless or polluting in relation to the rational and abstract perfection of God.
Postmodernism risks becoming another of these Manichaean seductions, for in its
privileging of language and its refusal to allow any intrinsic significance to the material
world, it constitutes the ultimate triumph of form over matter. The task of theology is
not simply to invert this in favour of a romanticized New Age pantheism, but to ask how
we can creatively imagine a different world through our playful and prayerful habitation
of the in-between, that space which is opened by grace, where Word and flesh encoun­
ter one another in the conceptually impossible/impossibly conceived union of the body
with God in the womb of the Virgin.
In its engagement with gender theory, theology must ask what is needed to repair the
ruptured relationship between language and materiality, and between self and neigh­
bour, without reinscribing bodies within the exhausted sexual essentialisms of modern­
ity. Such questions must also be asked of our relationships with the non-human aspects
of creation, for we are becoming aware of how interwoven our lives are with those of
the rest of creation, and how dependent we are on the intricate harmonies that create
an organic whole out of the myriad forms of being with which we share our threatened
planet.
The quest for an incarnational, Trinitarian theology, deeply rooted in the goodness
of creation, must attend to the significance of gender if it is to be faithful to the wisdom
of its own tradition. Gender theory dissolves the moral certainties and sexual binaries
 THE THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF GENDER 47

of bourgeois Christian modernity and ushers in a new and as yet unknowable future. It
invites renewed reflection on what it means to say with St Paul that ‘There is neither Jew
nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28).
Postmodern theologians make visible the lenses of gender in ways that bring strange
and sometimes challenging new perspectives into view. In this endeavour, theology is
no less constructivist than theory, for the bodies to which it refers are bodies queered by
grace (Loughlin 2007). Language clothes the naked human animal with gendered per­
sonhood made in the image of God, and theology springing from the graced creativity
of contemplation opens our imaginations to the myriad possibilities of gendered loving
and being that stream between the two poles of reproductive necessity. Coakley refers
to ‘gender’s mysterious and plastic openness to divine transfiguration’ so that ‘the ‘fixed’
fallen differences of worldly gender are transfigured precisely by the interruptive activ­
ity of the Holy Spirit, drawing gender into Trinitarian purgation and transformation.
Twoness, one might say, is divinely ambushed by threeness’ (Coakley 2009:11).
Theology is called to recognize the extent to which this divine ambushing decon­
structs the dualisms which might nevertheless be necessary to orientate us in relation to
the knowledge of good and evil from which every other dualism emerges. For as long as
history continues, violence and suffering will continue, and the moral reasoning neces­
sary to navigate a complex ethical path through life depends on our ability to do good
and avoid evil. But the classical theological tradition tells us that, like all human facul­
ties, our capacity for reasoning does not transcend the time-bound reality of our mortal
lives to give us insight into the being of God (Porter 2005). Only by allowing ourselves
to be drawn deeply into the mystery of the incarnate and risen God through contempla­
tion and desire, can we experience something of that unknowing which constitutes the
undoing of all that we know and enables us to live within the mystery.
Genesis 3 tells us that the first symptom of sin—the first intimation that all is not well
in God’s very good creation—manifests itself in the space of difference between the man
and the woman made in the image of God. Only with the acquisition of the knowledge
of good and evil did it become possible for us to banish God from the garden of cre­
ation and become like gods, through the dynamics of division, blame, and shame. But
Christianity knows that such knowledge is cursed. It is sin’s taproot into the human soul,
alienating us from God and from creation, and sowing the seeds of conflict within our
most intimate relationships.
The theological vocation is to emerge from deep silence into language, to seek to
articulate that unsayable mystery experienced by the soul which has ‘tasted and seen
the abyss of supreme eternal providence’. To allow something of this mystery to seep
through, theology needs language that is diaphanous, loosely woven in the ‘broken mid­
dle’ (Rose 1992) between the universal and the particular, the infinity of our imagination
and the finite vulnerability and dependence of our bodies. This means that theology
must be poetic, but it must also sift and filter its poetry through the fine mesh of wis­
dom. Wisdom is what remains when the materiality that seeps into our consciousness
through the porosity of the senses has been reflected upon, prayed upon, transformed
48 TINA BEATTIE

into iove, and animated by desire to materialize that love in the world. Only when we
know what it means to experience the quiver of desire for God in the sinews and ten­
dons of our flesh and in the deepest yearnings of our souls, only when we can say with
the Psalmist, ‘I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps. 139:14), can
theologians begin to ask what place gender and sexuality might have in our being and
doing, in our living and loving.

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