Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Feminismus: Umbenennung der Realität; Geschichte als Mittel d. Unterdrückung; keine verlässliche Quelle der Offenbarung; Abbild Gottes - Änderung d. Natur durch Bewusstseinsänderung; Hexerei - Antithese: kath. Glaube

Kurzinhalt: From the feminist point of view, there is no trustworthy revelation of God in history. Everything that purports to be revelation is actually nothing more than the construction of human beings intent on some agenda.

Textausschnitt: FEMINISM: RENAMING REALITY

73a Feminist theologians are today thought by most Catholics to be interested primarily in the ordination of women to the priesthood. This might have been true at one time, but that time is long past. Feminist theologians today have, by and large, either abandoned all efforts to breach the priestly fraternity or seek to breach it solely in order to change it, because they have, by and large, abandoned all interest in the priesthood as the Catholic Church understands it.1 What the feminists learned was that their own initial presuppositions which had led them at the beginning into conflict with the Church over two primary issues—contraception and the male priesthood—in fact constitute a wholesale denial of sacramentality at every level of Church teaching, whether it be the seven sacraments, the Church as sacrament of Christ, the marital union of Christ and the Church as the great sacrament or the sacramentality of the good creation rooted in the creation of male and female as the image of God.2 Indeed, it was their denial of the sacramentality of creation in the human sacramental imaging of God that undermined for them the entire sacramental structure erected on that foundation. And that denial was implicit in the origins of the feminist opposition to Church teaching on contraception and on the male priesthood. (Fs)

74a When Rosemary Radford Ruether declared, in defense of the ordination of women, "Theologically speaking, then, we might say that the maleness of Jesus has no ultimate significance",3 she was really saying that no one's maleness or femaleness has theological, that is to say, sacramental, significance. And when feminists from all sides declared that the ban on contraception kept them imprisoned in their biology from which they demanded liberation, they were declaring war on any notion of the body as sacramentally significant. Nothing made this clearer than the feminist manifesto urging women to take control of their reproductive functions. The language itself, as already noted, betrayed a view of the human body as a kind of machine that could be artificially manipulated to produce or not produce, and of babies as objects, that is, as the products of a process of reproduction. These two strokes, by which human sexuality in particular and then the body in general were robbed of any sacramental significance, made it impossible to sustain any notion of sacramentality consistent with the Catholic faith. Catholic feminist theologians, for good or ill, soon found themselves engaged not in a refurbishing of the Church and the world, but in a total destruction and reconstruction of both. (Fs)

74b In a seminal feminist work, Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979), the two editors, Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, observed in the introduction that "feminists have called their task a 'new naming' of self and world".4 It was already apparent then that this new naming of self and world was simply the most recent rerun of Eve's renaming of the forbidden fruit back in the garden of Eden. And this renaming constitutes the heart of the feminist agenda. Without this renaming, liberation as the feminists conceive it is not possible. For what they seek is precisely a liberation from the constraints of being called to image God. They wish to be self-actualized, self-realized beings, conforming to no one's image, not even God's, but naming for themselves just who and what they shall be. As Mary Daly puts it, "Metamorphosing women do not imitate/copy some 'fully realized' paternal form or model. Rather, we are Realizing/Forming/Originating.... We already have the powers to will our own further evolution."5
75a It should be clear by now that the feminists operate with a view of reality in which there is no Creator God, there is no call to image God as male and female, there is no revelation apart from female consciousness itself, and then only when that consciousness has gone through a process of consciousness-raising in which the unreality of the Christian revelation becomes transparently obvious. Once this consciousness is achieved, the view that we were created in the image of God and the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are seen to be nothing but two parts of a single larger process by which the powerful males of the past have defined man and morality in order to oppress everyone else. As a woman in the audience of a "Moral Perspectives on Abortion" panel at a conference sponsored by Women Church Convergence, a feminist body, put it so succinctly, "We have assumed that since patriarchy has defined the fetus as human life, we then call ourselves murderers when women choose to abort.... I'm sick of males defining our morality. For God's sake, let us, as women, decide."6 (Fs)

75b From the feminist point of view, there is no trustworthy revelation of God in history. Everything that purports to be revelation is actually nothing more than the construction of human beings intent on some agenda. History is always and everywhere the record of the victors, and this includes every record ever made, including of course the Bible. Everything is a form of propaganda pushing somebody's ideology. Nothing is to be trusted at face value. This is what the feminists mean by their "hermeneutics of suspicion". And on this foundation of suspicion the feminists have constructed their ideological alternative to Christian faith. (Fs) (notabene)
76a The alternative view of reality supplied by feminism is apparent in the use feminists make of consciousness-raising itself. This is a way of coming to view reality differently from the way one has previously seen it. Once this process has been accomplished, one is in a position, as the editors of Womanspirit Rising put it, to rename oneself and the world and thus to reshape the very nature of both. Reality, according to this view, begins in the human mind and then proceeds to change the outer or material world, beginning with the human body itself. All of reality is shaped by the human mind. In the past, according to this view, the human minds shaping reality were male. The future is to be shaped by the minds of females raised to this new consciousness of reality. (Fs) (notabene)

76b Most people are surprised when they first hear that witchcraft is enjoying an enormous revival in feminist circles, but there is a very important reason for this. Witchcraft is the very antithesis of the Catholic faith. It could find no place in a world informed by the faith. Once a view of reality diametrically opposed to Catholicism reappeared in the world, however, witchcraft was once again able to come into its own. (Fs)

76c Why is witchcraft the antithesis of the Catholic faith? Starhawk, the witch employed by Matthew Fox at his Creation Spirituality Institute in California, tells us that the word "witch" comes from the Anglo-Saxon root word wicca or wicce, which means "to bend or shape". According to Starhawk, witches of the past were "those who could shape the unseen to their will".7 The unseen, the invisible, is in this view of things at the disposal of the human will, to be shaped (i.e., rendered material) as the human will sees fit to shape it. This is the very antithesis of the creation narratives in Genesis. There the unseen, the invisible God, names things and, in so doing, shapes them and calls them into existence. The unseen shapes the seen to his will. In the case of the creation of man, the process is carried even further. God not only calls man into existence but specifically shapes him in such a way that man is able to image or render visible the unseen God himself. The invisible God does not conform himself to the will of man; rather he calls man to conform himself to the will of God, and, most importantly, in so doing, to conduct his life, including his bodily life and most especially including his sexual life, in such a way as to render visible in the world an authentic image of the inner life of the Trinity. In witchcraft, the witch assumes the position of God, bending and shaping the unseen as she sees fit. (Fs) (notabene)

77a Hence, when the Pope says, for example, as he did in Familiaris Consortio, that when couples have recourse to contraception they are altering the value of total self-giving or love, feminists not only agree but assert that this is precisely what they are intent on doing. They are renaming themselves and the world, they are bending and shaping the unseen, in this case love, to their own will. (Fs)

77b It should not surprise us that the feminist view of reality ultimately issues in the total displacement of God and the installation of man (or rather, woman) in his place. God in creation defined man, male and female, as his image. That is the only purpose which God has inscribed in our being. He has left us free to accept it or to reject it, but he has not supplied us with any alternatives to it. Hence, when we reject the definition and purpose which he has inscribed in our being, as the feminist view does, we have only two choices at our disposal. We may choose, as some nihilists do, to take the position that man has no particular meaning or purpose in life. Or we may choose, as the feminists among others do, to get into the business of defining our own meaning and purpose in life. In so doing, we usurp the place of God; we become our own gods. This does not change the fact that all paths lead to the grave, but it does mean that every person is now free to define for himself just what path he will take to his own particular grave. (Fs)

77c In the final analysis, this freedom to define reality for ourselves is the liberation that feminism has preached from the beginning. One might argue that being called to image God is an inestimable privilege, but it is a privilege the feminists and many others today would and do gladly forfeit in the name of a newfound liberation from all of the constraints that living out our lives as the image of God places upon us. Those constraints, seen in the Gospel as necessary forms of self-mastery that ultimately liberate us to the greatest freedom of all, the freedom to be the sons and daughters of God, are experienced today by many people as more confining than the worst of prisons. (Fs)