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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Women who pray with Paul, ‘I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me’ (Gal 2:20), as surely as we men are ‘imagines Christi’, in the analogous way in which we usually understand this. ‘For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son’ (Rom 8:29; cf. 1 Cor 15:49). But how can we affirm this without denying the theological relevance of Jesus' sex and gender identity? Saying that sex and gender is purely contingent and accidental (in the technical, ‘scholastic’ sense) seems, while true, somehow inadequate.
1 All citations are from the NAB (revised New Testament). I would like to thank my colleagues in the Theology Dept. of Duquesne University for their helpful comments on an early draft of this paper at one of our regular faculty colloquies; thanks, too, to some others who took the time to study and extensively comment on an earlier draft. Hopefully this ‘edition’ of the text shows that all this was not in vain.
2 ‘Scandal’ is meant here in the biblical sense of the ‘scandal of the cross’ (Gal 5:11): The Divine follows an ‘unexpected’, counter-cultural, path. See Rudolf Schnackenburg, ‘Scandal’, SV 3:813–16. Helpful, too, is Niebuhr, Richard R., Resurrection and Historical Reason: A Study of Theological Method (New York: Charles Scribners' Son, 1957), 172–181.Google Scholar
3 A point I have found stressed, almost incomparably, by Barth, Karl, especially in his Church Dogmatics, 4 vols., ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F., trans. Bromiley, G. W. et al. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1936–1977, using the 2nd ed. of vol. 1, 1975), 4:1, 2, 3Google Scholar. There are interesting connections here between particularity, difference, and narrative, connections which will not go unnoticed by those concerned with the issues raised by ‘postmodernity’. See the discussion on French Feminism in Carr, Anne E., Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women's Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 82–83Google Scholar; French Feminism's stress on ‘difference’ might be brought into fruitful relation with this paper's stress on particularity.
4 This, I know, is a battlefield of interpretation. Recognizing thai this needs another ‘treatise’, I side with those who hold that eternal life is the transformation, not the discarding, of the ‘body’ (here I follow Paul's use of this term in 1 Cor 15). There is continuity with discontinuity.
5 ‘As for prayers, whether we are invoking God without expressly mentioning Jesus Christ… or are addressing our prayer directly to him — if we do not actually utter by mouth the name of Christ, we ought to be thinking about it in our minds… we ought to possess at all times the fundamental and principal realization that our only access to God in prayer consists in being brought before his majesty by him who humbled himself to our level in order to accomodate himself to our littleness’, said John Calvin in a letter (Calvin's Ecclesiastical Advice, trans. Beaty, Mary and Farley, Benjamin W. [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991], 18Google Scholar). For the link between the Word and the Spirit in Calvin, see Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, vii, 4; III, i, 1–4, 33–35, 39.
Before going further, let me thankfully acknowledge two books which I have learned from and been somewhat dialoguing with in the above: Fischer, Kathleen, Women at the Well (New York: Paulist Press, 1988)Google Scholar, and Schneiders, Sandra M., Women and the Word, 1986 Madeleva Lecture (New York: Paulist Press, 1986)Google Scholar. The first caused me to think about some of the de-particularizing strategies mentioned above; the latter helpfully reinforced my thoughts about not bypassing particularity, although in a somewhat different but congenial way. For a helpful overview, with commentary, close to but still distinct from my own position, see Leonard, Ellen, ‘Women and Christ: Toward Inclusive Christologies’, Toronto Journal of Theology 6 (1990): 266–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 The great theme of Kenosis, found especially throughout Church Dogmatics 4:1.
7 See Church Dogmatics, 1:1, 2, passim.
8 This is biblical: 1 Jn 1:1–3; it is patristic: the great theme of Athanasius' On the Incarnation is precisely this ‘logic’.
9 Note how the notoriously difficult text of 1 Cor 11:7 does not, when seemingly giving men an authoritative status over women at Corinth, call man the ‘image of Christ’, but of ‘God’, and later, in 11:11, says that ‘in the Lord’ neither is independent of the other. Paul wants order, apparently, but seems ‘in the Lord’ to be searching for a less ‘patriarchal’ form of it. Here there is something of an apparently unresolved tension between the ‘image of God’ and the fellowship with Jesus (‘image of Christ’) traditions in Paul.
10 See Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, 4:2, 58–60Google Scholar, and von Balthasar, Hans Urs, Mysterium Paschale, trans. Nichols, Aidan (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1990), 95, 228–229.Google Scholar
11 Helpful here is Kittel, Gerhard, ‘Man as Image’, in TDNT 2:396–397Google Scholar, stressing the participative and fellowship dimensions (Col 3:10), as well as ethical (1 Cor 15:45), and Scheffczyk, Leo, ‘Image et ressemblance VI: Dans la théologie et la spiritualitée d'aujourd ‘hui’, DSp 7:2, 1463–1472Google Scholar. See IDB 2:682–85, and ISBE 2:803–5, ad loc., ‘Image of God’.
12 ere I will use the traditional phrase: ‘Christus totus’ means the Jesus who cannot be separated from his ‘mystical body’, and I would like to preserve that meaning in my use here, but adding as well the notion that it is the ‘complete Christ’, fully divine and fully human, that we have in mind.
13 And realities ‘compatible’ with it.
14 ‘Communion’ seems to entail a retrievable sense implied in the idea of image as ‘copy’ — namely, there is a oneness, a certain kind of conformity and patterning — but it also preserves the difference and uniqueness of the one patterning. The metaphor of ‘imitation’ (see 1 Thes 1:6; cf. 1 Cor 4:16, Heb 6:12, 13:7) also strongly accents the oneness and conformity, but implies ‘difference’ in the fact that one is not already an ‘image’, for one must work to imitate.
15 See ‘Declaration on the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood’, sec. 5, and nn. 16 and 17, in Vatican Council II: More Postconciliar Documents, ed. Flannery, Austin (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982), 338–342, 344–45Google Scholar. To my great surprise, I could not find one reference in the text (other than very indirectly in notes 16 and 17) to the ‘image of Christ’ tradition in the New Testament. This is a serious omission.