FEBRUARY 2005 - ISSUE 4 - ISSN 1448 - 632

JADE IRELAND

Abstract

This paper reflects upon Dr James Alison's Australian Catholic University's 2004 Felix Arnott Lecture entitled Atonement and redemption: A theology of redemption; and his workshop entitled On being liked. Alison's ideas prompted me to ask the question: What has Christian discourse potentially got to offer social justice issues that Western modern and postmodern secular humanist discourses cannot? What Alison (2002) is doing is post-postmodern: he is subverting the dominant patriarchal mediation of Scripture from within Christianity and simultaneously reclaiming the authority of God that postmodernism denies. However, in this article, I propose that Alison stops one step short in his substitutions.

Introduction

What has Christian discourse potentially got to offer social justice issues that Western modern and postmodern secular humanist discourses cannot? All secular humanist discourses draw their strength from reason alone, and therefore are ultimately nihilistic. This is because they begin and end with people bound within the space-time continuum; the final destination can only be death because the immanence- transcendence relationship is denied. What Alison (2002) is doing is post-postmodern. He is subverting the dominant patriarchal mediation of Scripture that has played a central role in the legitimation of Western European culture since the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century to the present day, and simultaneously reclaiming the authority of God that postmodernism denies. Alison does this without mentioning the word “patriarchy.”

The dominant patriarchal mediation of Scripture

Over the last two thousand years the story of Christianity has so far failed to disrupt the his-story of patriarchy; rule by the father. Patriarchy, in all its forms has systematically constructed women and other groups including homosexuals and people of colour as “Other” and oppressed these groups for the system’s own gain and maintenance. Since the time of the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, patriarchy has successfully appropriated, domesticated and distorted; or silenced and erased the subversive Christian story, as patriarchy has developed through all its political machinations. From Roman rule through the medieval Feudal system to modern democracy, patriarchal discourse has appropriated and domesticated the Christian story to the point where it has been used to maintain the construction of the category of woman as “Other;” the essential dichotomy for patriarchy to work. de Beauvoir (1972) explains the category of woman as Other when she argues, “she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (p. 16). In the great communist revolutions of the early 20th century in Russia and China, the Christian story was silenced as part of the attempt to liberate man from the abuses of capitalism. Marx reacted against his society’s domesticated distortion of the Christian story when he said, “Religion is the opium of the masses.” However, in rejecting the West’s distortion of the Christian story he also denied God, and consequently Communists remained in the violence of patriarchal discourse with great atrocities perpetrated under Stalin’s reign of terror and Mao’s cultural revolution. Marx’s folly can partly be explained by his position in history as a modern Man of Reason, a reductive reason, one closed to immanence and transcendence, to the “Other;” to God, women, gays and people of colour.

The emergence of the scientific paradigm

The emergence of the modern world with the Age of Enlightenment that developed out of the collapse of mediaeval feudalism in the West during the 15th and 16th centuries, saw the construction of the scientific paradigm. This paradigm reduced the truth of what it means to be human to instrumental reason. The modernist project denied the relational nature of humanity with God and reduced creation to the metaphor of Newton’s mechanical universe, thus galvanising patriarchal power with scientific certainty and eliding the Man of Reason with the power of God. Nietsche said, “God is dead.” Postmodernism arose as a reaction to modernism, and as such, bound by the same scientific paradigm, managed to convincingly deconstruct modernist claims. Norris (1982) explains a significant contribution of Nietsche’s to this deconstruction process:

Concepts are formed on the groundless supposition that our knowledge of objects in the world comes directly from our experience of what it is to perceive them. The link between empirical self-evidence and conceptual truth is, according to Nietsche, a species of metaphorical displacement, raising the contingent into the necessary by a constant (though unrecognised) leverage of tropes. (p. 77) 

A trope is a literary metaphor, arising from the Greek word “turn,” which generally “denotes any rhetorical or figurative device” (Cuddon, 1991, p. 1007).  As useful as this is for challenging the certainty of the modernist paradigm, deconstruction still only brings both the marginalised and the powerful to the same dead end; the autonomous individual as cultural construct bound within one’s ideological space-time continuum. The feminists movements have also been a reaction to patriarchy. As such, much of their efforts have paradoxically maintained woman as Other because the purpose has been to challenge gender power relationships within patriarchy, while maintaining a category of woman to legitimate difference. In searching for social justice, feminists have effectively made visible and problematic the role of power in the construction of gender within patriarchal discourse, and correctly identified this process as a central force against achieving social justice goals for both men and women. Since de Beauvoir’s (1972) insights, first made in the 1940s, “second wave” feminist scholarship has made the category of “woman” a problem, and challenged patriarchal thought and institutions on a global scale. This scholarship has been a significant motivator in the struggle for social justice for all women. Some American feminist classics that stand as evidence for this struggle include: Kate Millet’s (1970) Sexual politics, Juliet Mitchell’s (1973) Woman’s estate, Susan Brownmiller’s (1975) Against our will, Mary Daly’s (1978) Gyn-ecology, and Betty Friedan’s (1981) The second stage.  However, the flaw remains, secular feminist discourses also take women to the same dead end; the autonomous individual as cultural construct bound within their ideological space-time continuum. Since the 1970s, the feminist question of “the peculiar situation of the human male” (de Beauvoir, 1972) has generated a pro-feminist men’s movement that has also explored the construction of masculinity within patriarchy (Connell, 1987, 1995). Only time will tell if this men’s movement will ultimately support a power shift between men and women, or become another device for patriarchy to appropriate feminisms, by degenerating into what Hearn (1989) identifies as “mostly boy’s own papers.” Whether or not the men’s movement supports secular feminisms in their quests, the men’s movement draws patriarchial discourse no closer to the realisation that its reductionistic substitution of patriarchy’s concept of man and God, for God, keeps humanity in a state of violence. As de Beauvoir (1972) pointed out, “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute “ (p.16). The rise of the religious right in both America and Australia at the present time is evidence of patriarchy’s current, modernist mediation of Christianity as a violent force to control society. The religious right is seeking to re-marginalise and silence minority voices that have been heard because of the postmodern project: most visibly women, homosexuals, people of colour; and most recently, Islam.

The emergence of post-postmodernism

So, to reiterate, what Alison (2002) is doing is post-postmodern. He is subverting the dominant patriarchal mediation of Scripture that has played a central role in Western European culture since the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century to the present day, and simultaneously reclaiming the authority of God that postmodernism denies. Alison’s reading of Scripture provides a logical way for the Man of Reason to see the lie of patriarchy, and understand that his grasping for power and control in his patriarchal ideological space-time continuum only keeps him from who he really is; a relational being in God. On the ontological level, that is the very Being of what it means to be human, there are no categories of man and woman because the dignity of the human person flows directly from one’s relationship with God. The human person is Adamah, earth creature made in the image of God (Genesis). It is only at the phenomenological level that patriarchy has appropriated Scripture and positioned woman as the Other. This is symbolised by the culturally dominant reading of Eve as the temptress who was the cause of the fall of man from Paradise. This reading results from the dominant-submissive binary system of thinking of the Western Logos that has its beginnings with the Greeks: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (Norris, 1982). As such, patriarchy, and consequently patriarchy’s mediation of Christianity can only ever be a shadow on the wall in Plato’s cave.

Importantly, the world’s major religions all advocate that the disciple enter an inner journey to attain self-knowledge. Common to all traditions are meditation and prayer practices, which take the disciple into silence; the place that ideology cannot distort. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, “There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence (Dowling Singh, 1998, p. 143) The Hindu Maharamayana states, “The supreme truth is established by total silence, not logical discussion and argument. He alone sees the truth who sees the universe without intervention of the mind, and therefore without the notion of a universe (Freke, 1998, p.16). de Castanzano (1980) succinctly captures the point made by the medieval Christian mystic Symeon: 

(Symeon) wishes to move Christians away from any superficial, externally motivated relationship with God into a deeper person-to-person relationship.  This means one has to destroy idols, go beyond words and ideas, and live in the awesome darkness of mystery that becomes a light to those who have become purified. The inner presence of the Trinity, like a magnet, draws man’s “conscious attention” away from the old mental constructs that have become cliched and lifeless into a new manner of intuitively experiencing and knowing God. As the Trinity becomes that center of inner direction, the individual loses the conscious control he had developed earlier… Jesus Christ as Light, along with the two indwelling Divine Person as Light, unites Himself with the Christian, making him “light from Light, true god from  God.” This union defies description. (pp. 35-36) 

Reason alone cannot grasp this paradox. It is incomprehensible to the modernist scientific paradigm because it is paradoxical and mysterious. It is incomprehensible to both the modernist scientific and postmodern paradigms because it is outside of ideology, “one has to destroy idols” (de Castanzano, 1980, p. 36). It draws its truth from the silence of God not language, “go beyond words and ideas, and live in the awesome darkness of mystery” (de Castanzano, 1980, p. 36). All language is metaphor; ideologically constructed; and therefore, ultimately separates us from God. While denying God, the postmodernists revealed that language is ideological and that theory is cultural narrative. Derrida (1982), constructing metaphors for literary theory, refers to humanity alone as Being and explains how the deconstruction process can unmask the illusion of certainty that language often seeks to make: 

(D)econstruction instigates the subversion of every kingdom. The play of a trace which no longer belongs to the horizon of Being: the play of trace, or the différance, which has no meaning and is not. Which does not belong. There is no maintaining, and no depth to this bottomless chessboard on which Being is put into play. Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating, like the writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance…trace….erasure belongs to its structure. (pp. 22-24) 

Put more simply using scientific metaphors: in the scientific paradigm the prevailing narrative provides the system of understanding through which the data is simultaneously conceptualised and filtered. Thus, the prevailing narrative is continuously and simultaneously erasing and privileging within its ideological intent, as it continually reinvents itself. Derrida’s term “trace” is used “to signify his view that there is no simple sense in which linguistic signs are either present or absent…..no sign is complete in itself” (Cuddon, 1991, p. 981). He invents the term “différance” to communicate his idea of the play of differences which “involves syntheses and referrals (renvios) which prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element which is present in and of itself and refers only to itself….Nothing, in either the elements or the systems, is anywhere ever simply present or absent” (Cuddon, 1991, pp. 981-982). Derrida recognises the relationality of the human experience but places human culture at its centre rather than God, and just as effectively imprisons humanity within the illusion of certainty created by language, as the ideologies that deconstruction discourse can unmask. An analogy with novels is instructive. Davis argues that, “Novels do not depict life, they depict life as it is represented by ideology” (cited in Hutcheon, 1989, p. 49). Theories are just as ideologically positioned. Theories do not depict life; they depict life as it is represented by ideology (Barbour, 1996; Hutcheon, 1989; Kuhn, 1970). Featherstone (1988) understood this postmodern problem: 

For those who take seriously the implication of postmodernism as a mode of critical theorizing or cultural analysis, the attempt to produce a sociological understanding must necessarily fail as it cannot avoid totalizations, systemizations and legitimation via the flawed grand narratives of modernity: science, humanism, Marxism, feminism…. (p. 205) 

The important distinction between theory and liturgy

Alison, in his 2004 Felix Arnott Memorial lecture, Atonement and redemption: a theology of resurrection made the important distinction between theory and liturgy. He said that “theory complicates our lives” and “liturgy happens to you.” This prompted me to reflect that as soon as we put the experience of liturgy into words, the words reduce the experience/liturgy to ideology. All human language is ideological because it is both the product of and produces a culture bound in time and space that constructs a systematic way of making sense of itself. In authentic liturgy we experience God. One’s innate human disposition to language immediately mediates the intimate God-human encounter into an ideological framework as one thinks about it, to make meaning. People then construct liturgy to live the original God-human liturgy in the presence of God that is both within and beyond the space-time continuum. If one perceives that one is re-living the original experience, this would not be authentic liturgy. For liturgy to be authentic, one must live it in the presence and present with God. The people who experience intimate God-human encounters, that is liturgy, the mystics and prophets, make sense of their experiences and communicate them to others through language. The God inspiration in this language invites reason to open to both immanence and transcendence simultaneously, thus, providing the opportunity for one to dissolve boundary illusions and see the Other as oneself. The listeners however, receive a mediated message, mediated through both the speaker’s ideological lens and their own. Abraham Heschel (1969), in his introduction to The Prophets begins to explain this process of mediation that the Hebrew prophets play when he acknowledges and identifies the personal qualities of the men that mediate God’s message: 

The prophet is a person, not a microphone. He is endowed with a mission,  with the power of a word not his own that accounts for his greatness-but also with temperament, concerns, character, and individuality. As there was no resisting the impact of divine inspiration, so at times there was no resisting the vortex of his own temperament. The word of God reverberated in the voice of the man The prophet’s task is to convey a divine view, yet as a person he is a point of view. He speaks from the perspective of God as perceived from the perspective of his own situation. We must seek to understand not only the views he expounded but also the attitudes he embodied: his position, feeling, response-not only what he said but also what he lived; the private, the intimate dimension of the word, the subjective side of the message. (p.x) 

Heschel (1969) was developing his method of Scriptural analysis in the 1930s (p. xii). In identifying the prophet as a man with a “point of view” (p.x) and arguing that this point of view would itself create a subjective side to God’s message, Heschel was pre-empting the successful post-modern dis-illusionment of the modern concept of objectivity within the Academy. Challenging the modernist claim of the certainty of objectivity, the postmodernists revealed it to often be no more than, “a disguise for power or authority in the Academy, and often as the last fortress of white male privilege” (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, cited in McDowell, 1999, p.618). The word “postmodern” began gaining currency in the early 1930s when it was first used by two writers: Frederico De Onis and Arnold Toynbee. De Onis, a Spaniard, used the term “postmodern” to describe “a reaction from within Modernism” (Jencks, 1986, p.2) in 1934. In his book Antologia de la poesia espanola e hispnoamericana. Toynbee took a more encompassing approach with the term “postmodern” to describe “the new historical cycle which started in 1875 with the end of western dominance, the decline of individualism, capitalism and Christianity, and the rise of power of non-western cultures. In addition it referred to a pluralism and world culture” (Jencks, 1986, p.2).

Importantly, Heschel (1969) avoided the post-modern neo-deterministic position that relativises all ideological positions and silences and erases God, the power that can take the human being outside language through the God-human relationship. The post-modern neo-deterministic position can be summed up in Derrida’s claim, “Il n’y pas de hors-texts,” that is, “There is nothing outside the text” (Norris, 1982, p.41). This is the illusion of patriarchy: to continually construct and reconstruct a system of beliefs and values that silence and erase, or appropriates into itself, any discourse that seeks to subvert it. Patriarchal discourses convincingly create the illusion that there is nothing outside the text of patriarchy as it “shapeshifts” through many different political ideologies and pre-modern, modern and postmodern paradigms. Postmodernism was, and still is a reaction to modernism, as Western European colonialism began to fall and marginalised voices challenged the dominant-submissive binary system of thinking of the Western Logos. Postmodern thought has challenged the modern world to make a conceptual shift from certainty and closure within teleologies constrained by the patriarchally mediated “assumptions of origin, presence and Truth” (Norris, 1982, p. 70) to a postmodern world. The postmodern world has been seeking recognition of uncertainty and pluralism and an opening of the discursive frameworks in search of new ways of making meaning: constructing a re-definition of the world.

Feminists have also taken advantage of this opening to challenge patriarchy. Alice Jardine (1985), in her work, “Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity” suggested that “the master discourses of the West are increasingly perceived as no longer adequate for explaining the world; words and things no longer coincide, and all identities have been thrown into question!” She went on to “agree with Roland Barthes and others that at the forefront of modernity (French term for postmodernism) is the battle against those systems of mediations which have (over)determined our history: Money, the Phallus, and the Concept as privileged operators of meaning” (p.101). However, more importantly, Jardine (1985) recognised that: 

To the extent that feminism is primarily a battle against what are perceived as “false images” of woman, it is necessarily bound to some of the most complex epistemological and religious contradictions of contemporary Western culture. That is, the feminist gesture is as much a derivative of the law it is fighting as are its Others-and what is at stake at all of our intersections is, precisely, not to lose sight of that fact. (p.101) 

All postmodern and feminists thought needs to recognise its reactionary position to patriarchal modernism; through a Girardian (Alison, 2002) lens, the reactionary position is symbolic of the rivalistic younger sibling trying to murder the powerful older sibling.  Modernism, postmodernism and secular feminisms are contained within the secular, scientific paradigm and as such, they are impoverished, reductionistic ways of making meaning about humanity. The post-modern neo-deterministic position summed up in Derrida’s claim that, “There is nothing outside the text” (Norris, 1982, p.41) succinctly states the limited human boundaries of this paradigm that positions the individual as only a cultural construct and denies, silences and erases the relational nature of humanity with God. Derrida doesn’t realise that God cannot be reduced to metaphor. In contrast, John’s Gospel says: 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood (the Greek word also means overcome; or grasped) it. (John 1: 11-5) 

This Scripture challenges the reader to see the limits of metaphor with the use of paradox. It invites the reader to venture into prayer and contemplation; a journey that can open one to the truth that lives in the silence that is found within God’s irruption within the body, beyond the limits of ideology. Postmodernism and secular feminisms are as much “in the darkness” as modernism is. The Word is the relational person of God in Jesus Christ that calls humanity to freedom. This is a paradigm shift from Derrida’s notion of humanity as contained only within an ideological language system that positions the person only as a cultural construct within the secular, temporal power relationships evidenced in human language.

Alison’s recovery project using Girard’s mimetic theory

The Western patriarchal mediation of Scripture saw Jesus’ message appropriated and domesticated to support patriarchy in all its evolving political forms. Alison is seeking to recover and reveal God’s message as mediated through Jesus. He does this by using Girard’s mimetic theory (Alison, 2002) as the lens through which to make sense of the story of patriarchy; a story of violence and scapegoating of the innocent victim to justify the persecutors of warrior cultures. Then, in turn, Alison uses mimetic theory to help make visible how the Scriptures subvert the story of patriarchy from within. He does this by inviting men to see the lie of patriarchy within the larger context of the loving, forgiving “Father” God; opening up a pathway for atonement and redemption that patriarchal discourses of the many “fathers” has silenced for its own survival. The lie of patriarchy is man’s mimicking of man rather than God. By mimicking each other, men seek power and control of the space-time continuum through competition, banding together to find an Other over which to be Lord. War is the dominant discourse of patriarchy and the blood sacrifice of the warrior the entry into manhood. Might is right, the dignity of the person that flows from one’s relational nature with God is denied both in the Other and in the dominant group; everyone loses in this culture of death.

So, the subversive story of Christianity is a story for men, potentially, to enable them to set themselves free from their own patriarchal discourses. Men really need this story because they have never been able to experience carrying and bearing a child. Patriarchy has always kept men from being too involved in the rearing of children. Patriarchy has constructed men as being “not women.” Transition into manhood is separating from one’s own mother, that is, to become “other” to the primal identity of “one-with- mummy.” The clear separation of gender roles in patriarchy established men as superior in all ways to women and women’s work, as compensation for and in denial of that alienating experience of being “not–one-with-mummy.” All the lessons about being fully human in the space-time continuum that men can potentially learn from Jesus’ subversion of patriarchy, women have historically had the opportunity to learn from being mothers, that is, pacifically imitating, rather than being alienated from their mothers. Women, by their biological nature have participated in the liturgy of creation with God as they carry their babies, give birth and suckle their children. This seems to me to be liturgy as Alison argues, lived experience prior to language/theory/ideology. John’s Jesus acknowledges this very point when he compares his imminent liturgy of his death (pain of birth separation) and resurrection (joy of creation) to childbirth: 

A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world” (Jn 16:21).  

Patriarchal distortion of women’s liturgy

Importantly, patriarchal Christianity has purposefully sought to distort women’s experiences as they are mediated through its ideology. The control of women’s biology by patriarchy has mostly effectively been achieved through the traditional Christian marriage contract. The beginnings of the misogynist, patriarchal Christian meta-narrative can be traced back to within merely two generations of early Christianity. Jesus’ radical message of equality and inclusiveness that so threatened the social and political structures of his day were soon effectively appropriated and domesticated. Reuther (2000) explains: 

In the new Christian ‘family’ class and ethnic lines were leveled, and women emancipated to preach alongside men. In Christ the ‘orders’ of a fallen creation were overcome; there was no more division between male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free. Very early, however, within the first two generations of the Christian movement whose traditions are part of the New Testament, a reaction against the radical implications of this idea of the Church as a new egalitarian family arose, that sought to reinstate patriarchal hierarchy within the Christian movement and to model the emerging clerical hierarchy after it. (p. 36) 

Jesus’ earthly vision was soon domesticated to reinstate the patriarchal political and social status quo. Patriarchal Christianity proceeded to further marginalise women as the clerical hierarchy proceeded to create feudal theocracies that privileged patriarchal power, wealth and status above Jesus’ teachings. Women were scapegoated as the problem and origin of sex as sin. Reuther explains St Augustine’s position: 

Concupiscence, Augustine believed had come about only through the Fall, and expressed the loss of control from God. Thus in our present fallen state, sex, even in marriage, carried with it sin. Through it the original sin of Adam was passed on to the next generation. (p. 42) 

Reuther captures the extent of this misogyny: 

Sex outside marriage was totally sinful, but sex even within marriage was degrading to be hedged around with severe restrictions. No contraception    was allowed, since sex was allowable only for its main “good”, procreation. But women should submit to the sexual demands of their husbands, even if pregnant or if their husbands were violent or suffered from leprosy, in order to avoid the far worse possibility that their husbands might seek sexual gratification elsewhere. The definition of sex in marriage as ‘remedy of concupiscence’ defined wives as a kind of sink for their husbands’ sexual urges, regardless of the personal or physical effects on their wives. (p. 43)   

In the post-modern world, as the patriarchal Christian meta-narrative lost power, patriarchy ironically regained significant control of women through liberal feminism. This project privileged the masculine norm and sought equality as achieving sameness as men. An example of liberal feminism’s successful appropriation is Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, commonly referred to by the oxymoron the “Iron Lady” (Garfinkel, 1990). Thatcher, who dominated British politics during the 1980s demonstrated that she could speak the patriarchal discourse of conservative politics better than any man in Britain at the time. Harold Wilson, the former Labor Prime Minister said, “Mrs Thatcher’s image is that of the toughest man we’ve got” (Garfinkel, 1990, p. 56). Thatcher’s 1982 Falkland’s war victory positioned her as a warrior.

Upon receiving word of the Argentine surrender, she declared, “Today has put the Great back in Britain.” A cheering, happy crowd gathered in front of 10 Downing Street and sang “Rule, Britannia,” an old anthem celebrating the invincibility of the British navy. (Garfinkel, 1990, p. 95) 

In the following election campaign a poster held up by a smiling band of women in north London during the campaign said it clearly: “MAGGIE IS OUR MAN!” (Garfinkel, 1990, p. 99). Patriarchy’s appropriation of liberal feminism is demonstrated in Margaret Thatcher, physically a woman speaking the patriarchal discourse at the expense of all women. Anthony Sampson, in The changing anatomy of Britain said, “She opposed legislation for equal rights for women, partly on the grounds of Socrates: ‘Woman made equal to man becomes his superior’” (Garfinkel, 1990, p. 69). The postmodernist Paul A. Bové (1986) acknowledged patriarchy’s ideological power when he said:

Liberal Western society tolerates pluralism only as long as it creates no authentic opposition that cannot be contained by a system of hegemony and bureaucracy. (p. 14) 

Another example, the pathologising of childbirth within the modern Western medical model distanced women from their ability to open to the irruption of the Divine within their bodies. The feminists’ struggles to reclaim their custodial authority over their own bodies has been an ongoing one (The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1985). A discussion of this area is beyond the scope of this paper. Patriarchal discourses distance women from Wisdom, Sophia, awaiting them, so that they can journey towards the Divine through their bodies, their essential liturgy of creation.

Alison’s thesis of the Atonement talks about the “Holy of Holies” in the first Temple as being symbolic of the microcosm of creation. Was the “Holy of Holies” a patriarchal substitution that effectively distanced men from the liturgy of childbirth, that is the liturgy of creation? Alison explains that when Jesus emerged from the open tomb in the garden, Jesus was deliberately living out the liturgy of the “Holy of Holies” by being the Lord emerging through the Veil to set humans free. It was God working out of love for his people to allow creation to flow. Jesus was the authentic High Priest restoring the covenant with God. What patriarchy silences is that every time a woman gives birth she renews the covenant with God. In that moment, God opens the world to another possibility to be at One with God; the pattern of salvation and creation are held together as one in that moment of liturgy. When women and men participate in the ever-present liturgy of childbirth and nurturing, they have the potential to experience the relational nature of one’s being as they open to experiencing this unconditional love in the mystery of life.  Alison argues that Jesus reveals the mechanism of the lie of patriarchy by substituting himself for a series of substitutions: human sacrifice to placate the Gods; sacrificial lamb to God; Jesus re-membered as bread and wine, crucified as the sacrificial lamb revealing sacrifice as murder. Alison argues that Jesus undoes the binds of victimhood by revealing to men that men can live without sacrificing others for their gain. I suspect that mothers can, and often do, learn that they don’t need to sacrifice others for their own gain. Even though they have often sacrificed themselves in childbirth so that their child might have life, most would not have considered substituting their child; they continue to be able to live in creation as if death in childbirth were not. They engage in the risky project even though they don’t know how it will end. Mothers have the opportunity to experience self-giving generosity and not focus on their suffering in childbirth but on the creative activity with joy, just as Alison argues that Jesus did as he faced his crucifixion.

As a mother learns to mother, she is constantly forgiven by her baby for the mistakes she makes. Through this forgiveness, she can learn to forgive her baby for the stress it causes her; forgive herself for her inadequate mothering; and continue to be forgiven by her baby and so on, as they grow in relationship together. As she discovers her sin (missing the mark) in the process of forgiveness, her heart breaks open to experience love she had never before imagined. This really is “natural law” (Dwyer, 1994, pp.660-675). In this space of unconditional love for her child, a mother fulfils the liturgy of atonement and experiences redemption, through revelation as repentance. This reading resonates with Alison’s explanation of man’s relationship with God as revealed through his reading of atonement and redemption.

Alison’s reading of atonement and redemption subverts patriarchy and opens up patriarchal men to the possibility of emptying themselves of their ideological discourses. To do this, they will need to open themselves to the aspects of the Other, firstly, the category of woman, that patriarchy has so systematically denied them access to. From a Jungian point of view, one could say that they will need to own and integrate the feminine aspects of their own psyche that patriarchy has demanded that they deny and repress into their shadow (Jung, 1933). Sanford (1977) argues that the Bible is a map of the Western psyche. I would prefer to be more transparent and say that it is the map of the Western patriarchal male psyche. The Jungian notion of the individuation process that calls one to wholeness recognises the Christ figure as symbolic of the Jungian notion of the individuated, whole person (Chapman, 1997). As man integrates the Other, woman, into himself to become whole, he is ever more present to be open to the opportunity to acknowledge and surrender ever more deeply into his relationship with Christ and God. Jesus did this himself when he opened himself to the wisdom of the Syrophoenician woman (Mk 7:24-30). The only time in the Gospels that Jesus learns a lesson, he learns it from a woman, a woman oppressed by both gender and race. Jesus learns the important lesson that justice can only be for everyone, or else it is not justice.

Conclusion

So, men and women need to read Scripture differently because the original texts were written for men with the purpose of subverting patriarchy. Ironically, inclusive language interpretations of Scripture actually help silence the problem of patriarchy and perpetuate the illusion that there is nothing outside the text of patriarchy. Because patriarchy, or Christianity mediated through patriarchy, is dependent upon the dominant/submissive man/woman dichotomy it cannot be just, from a theological point of view. Therefore it is inconsistent with the new covenant and cannot advance social justice for women or any Other: including gay, coloured, or poor. Men bound within patriarchal discourses are “unripe” for and antagonistic towards the Word of God.  Men made by patriarchy need subversive stories to open them to the possibility of transformation and freedom. They need subversive stories that will allow them to recognise their own woundedness. Patriarchal men cannot desire to engage in the healing journey if they do not know that they are the walking dead (Mt 8:22). This is why God inspired men and women to write the books in the Bible. However, so far patriarchy has successfully appropriated and domesticated this subversive text. Alison’s (2002) reading seeks to reassert the subversion of patriarchy from within.

References

Alison, J. (2002). Raising Abel: The recovery of the eschatological imagination. New York: Crossroad Herder.

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Jade Ireland will graduate from the Master of Social Science (Pastoral Counselling) ACU in 2005. She is currently teaching at Mt Alvernia College, Kedron and has a B.A. (Com) USQ; Grad. Dip. (Ed) and Grad. Cert. (R.E.) ACU; and M. Bus.(Com) QUT.

Email: irelandbentley@bigpond.com

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