Castrating and De-mythologizing
Feminist Christian Theology: Mary Daly and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Note: This piece is the first in a three part series examining the movement from feminist theology to womanist theology to queer theology. It was original submitted as an essay for Dr. Natalia Marandiuc’s class, HTH 323: Feminist, Womanist, and Queer Theologies.
In the beginning, before anything else, was G/d1. G/d was all and all was G/d. Though complete unto godself, G/d was also a community of three persons in one G/d, one G/d who was three persons. Through G/d all that is received being. Versions of these events were told in creation myths, stories meant to explain the relationships in and between G/d, humanity, and the cosmos. Men wrote these myths because men had the physical and social dominance to lay claim to that authority. Thus, G/d was imaged in the likeness of man and used by men to retain hierarchical power over all others. Christian theologians posited that Father-God through the virility of Spirit-God impregnated Mary of Nazareth and she gave birth to Jesus, Son-God of Father-God. More to the point, Jesus is G/d incarnate in a male human body, which men took as proof of a male headship, a reflection of Father-God’s divine headship over all things. This patriarchal understanding of Christian faith would be the norm until Mary Daly questioned the inherent maleness of G/d. Through her radical deconstruction of patriarchal theology, she questioned the assumed superiority of man and laid the foundation upon which Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza would erect a systematic reconstruction of theological language in a more inclusive form.
In her work, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation,2 Daly laid bare the self-perpetuating nature of patriarchal theology by dismantling the inherent biases of gendered language in relation to G/d. Daly depicts the necessity of her work as arising from the gendered caste system. She writes, “The fact of women’s low caste status has been—and is—disguised. It is masked first, by sex role segregation [emphasis hers]” (Daly, 2). She defines this segregation as a deluded belief that women should be regarded as equal yet different in way that assigns them to the role of helpmeet. This gendered caste system, according to Daly, went unquestioned because a woman’s status is dependent on her relationships with and usefulness to men, which “divides [women] against each other and encourages identification with patriarchal institutions which serve the interests of men at the expense of women” (Daly, 3).
Daly argues that the center of this system resides in the male imaging of G/d. She writes, “if God is male, then the male is God” (Daly, 19). The association between maleness and G/d’s being is absolute within Christian theology of the time and cannot be subverted without radically shifting classical theology’s foundational understanding of G/d. She critiques theological reformists Mary Baker Eddy and Ann Lee, both of whom tried to create a more egalitarian image of G/d by emphasizing the maternal elements in G/d’s nature. She argues that while this may reform the way we talk about Father-God, it does nothing to liberate women from the oppressive systems of patriarchy because women would still be viewed as a lesser or incomplete version of G/d’s image. Instead, she proposes a radical step: the castration of Father-God. She writes, “The method of liberation, then involves a castrating [emphasis hers] of language and images that reflect and perpetuate the structures of a sexist world. It castrates precisely in the sense of cutting away the phallocentric value system imposed by patriarchy” (Daly, 9).
Her suggestion of castrating God-language, stripping it of the essence of maleness, struck patriarchal theology at its core. In effect, by declaring that man is not god, we free both G/d and all genders from having to perform a specific type of masculinity. Once free of our obligation to Victorian masculinity (and by association Victorian femininity), we can envision a humanity, a theology, and a deity that is beyond the reach of oppressive patriarchal systems. This proposal and the indecent language she used to make it swept across the theological landscape like a tornado across Midwestern farmland: it cleared a conceptual space for a new inclusive language. A space that Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza used to reconstruct feminist theology as a critical theology.
Shortly after Mary Daly publicly renounced her Christian faith, Fiorenza published “Feminist Theology as a Critical Theology of Liberation.”3 She argues that there is a need for feminist critique of religious texts because it questions what we have held unquestionable. She writes:
A hermeneutics which merely attempts to understand the Christian tradition and texts in their historical settings, … does not suffice, since it does not sufficiently take into account that tradition is a source not only of truth but also of untruth, repression, and domination (Fiorenza, 612).
Thus, critical feminist theology serves as a framework that scrutinizes the historical and cultural biases within theological discourse. Its aim is to reconstruct faith in ways that promote justice and inclusion.
Fiorenza argues that feminist theology must be a critical theology because traditional theology is born of patriarchal systems and myths. Myths serve as foundational narratives within religions, providing frameworks for understanding the divine, humanity, creation, and morality. They establish common values and shape communal identities, revealing social norms and cultural priorities inherent in faith traditions. In other words, the stories we tell shape the societies we create. Because conquerors write their own myths, all Christian theology has been swaddled in male biases. Therefore, women and others who are not men must engage in what she terms a process of de-mythologizing and re-mythologizing.
For Fiorenza, the first step in the journey toward an equitable and humanized Christianity is the liberation of Mariology. The patriarchal Mary-myth de-emphasizes her active status in the coming of G/d’s kin-dom by prioritizing her passive role as the virginal mother. “She is seen as the humble ‘handmaiden’ of God who, because of her submissive obedience and her unquestioning acceptance of the will of God, became the ‘mother of God’” (Fiorenza, 622). Mariology defines women as cisgender and passive by reducing her role to that of bearing children. The enforcement of this status in turn prioritizes the opposite status, that of the active, cisgender male who, through his god-given ability to reason, turns the spirit-body dualism into a male-female dualism, with women being the lesser of the two.
It is not, however, enough to simply de-mythologize. Fiorenza argues it must be followed by a new myth-making, or re-mythologizing, rooted in the active involvement of women in the foundation of the church and throughout its history. She suggests that Mary of Magdala can, after appropriate de-mythologizing, serve as a new myth because her story is grounded in her lived experiences pre-Christ, active apostleship during Christ’s ministry, and work of proclamation post-resurrection. In Mary Magdalene women and other non-men can find a figure to emulate who embodies an active and culture-changing faith.
There is a direct line between Mary Daly’s radical deconstruction of patriarchal language to Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s reconstruction through mythmaking. Daly's radical challenge exposed the biases and exclusion inherent in traditional theology, while Fiorenza’s feminist hermeneutics re-imagined a more inclusive and equitable framework for faith. Together, their contributions illustrate the trajectory from critique to transformation, emphasizing the importance of questioning entrenched systems and building alternative paradigms. Simultaneously, the myopia of their White perspectives gave rise to new theologies, like womanism and mujerista theology, to continue the work of liberating Christianity through deconstruction and reconstruction.
G/d is my attempt to disrupt masculine and binary understandings of the Divine. The slash, “/” in place of the “o” is meant to visually disrupt associations of masculinity with the Divine.
Daly, M. (1973). Beyond God the Father: Toward a philosophy of women’s liberation. Beacon Press.
Schüssler Fiorenza, E. (1975). Feminist theology as a critical theology of liberation. Theological Studies, 36(4), 605–626.