Читать книгу Without Precedent - Geoffrey Kirk - Страница 7

If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first weapon of the discontented is the welcome lie.

—Professor Michael Nolan

Christianity is an historical religion. By that is meant not simply that like all things else it has a history; but that it is peculiarly related to a particular historical moment. Christianity relates to Christ. By that is meant not merely a notional savior (a “Christ figure” as one might say), but Jesus of Nazareth. The post-Christian theologian Daphne Hampson, in her book Theology and Feminism, puts the matter very clearly:

Christians believe in particularity. That is to say they believe that God was in some sense differently related to particular events, or may be said in particular to have revealed God’s self through those events, in a way in which this is not true of all other events or periods in history. Above all they believe that that must be said of Christ which is to be said of no other human being. However they may express his uniqueness, they must say of Jesus of Nazareth that there was a revelation of God through him in a way in which this is not true of you or me. God is bound up with peculiar events, a particular people, above all with the person Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore reference must needs always be made to this history and to this person.19

It is, of course, possible to admit the truth of that observation and still to see that there are profound problems. Who exactly is the Jesus of Nazareth to whom reference is necessarily made? What do we mean by “historical”? And how can we be certain that we have grasped and comprehended the import of the “historical moment”? These are not quibbles. If the aim of the Church is to base itself on the will, purpose, and intention of Jesus of Nazareth, it must have confidence in its means of discerning what that will and intention is.

What is usually called “the quest for the historical Jesus” began with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor at the University of Hamburg in the mid-eighteenth century, whose thesis was so explosive that it was not published in full until 1972. For almost two hundred years the project remained a largely German undertaking, though from the late nineteenth century onwards, a few British, French, and American academics made their contributions. The aim was to identify a “human” Jesus, distinct from the divine “Christ of faith” exhibited in the Gospels and Epistles. The notion that there might be no useful distinction was not entertained. Recently when Joseph Ratzinger wrote as though they were one and the same, Geza Vermes dismissed the resulting volumes with something approaching scorn.20 In the 1970s the action moved from Germany to England, and then, predominantly, America. It concentrated—after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls—on the Jewishness of Jesus and located him in the ethos of inter-testamental and post-biblical Judaism. Two things are clear from this protracted exercise: the first, that its conclusions are tentative and precarious; the second, that it makes assumptions about the supernatural which put it at variance with the scriptural witness and with Christian belief.

At the end of the first stage of the quest, in 1906, Albert Schweitzer famously called the whole operation into question. It was, he claimed, hopelessly subjective. Each scholar, he said, merely paraded before us a Jesus of his own invention, made in his own image and likeness.21 Equally famously, twenty years later, the great Rudolf Bultmann, the originator of Formgeschichte, came to an even more devastating conclusion: “We can know almost nothing about the life and personality of Jesus,” he wrote, “since the early Christian sources show no interest in either.”22

Reimarus, the originator of the Quest, was a Deist, and in many respects the inspiration of Lessing, who published fragments of his work. Both played their part in the general Enlightenment project for the reinterpretation of Christianity as a religion of humanitarian morality independent of all divine intervention or revelation. Integral to the Quest, from the very beginning, was the premise that an “historical,” a purely “human,” Jesus could not have had and could not have supposed himself to have had, a divine origin. In short, the questers ruled out the miraculous, the providential, and the supernatural—the main burden of the biblical texts—and saw those texts as merely a rich vein (alas, almost the only vein) to be mined for more mundane information. The result was to undermine the concept of canonicity, and the very authority of the texts. But that, of course, was the intention. Jesus is a fascinating character—but not obviously more so than, for example, Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Apart, that is, from the great prize of demolishing the pretentions of the Christian Church in the process of “rediscovery.”

All this inevitably relates to the question of the ordination of women. Because of the historical nature of Christianity, reference must necessarily be made, in commending such an innovation, to the teaching of Jesus. The question on the campus t-shirts becomes the sixty-four thousand dollar question: “What would Jesus do?” But how to answer it on a subject—the social and cultic status of women—which Jesus never directly addresses? If Schweitzer was right the answers will have no more authority than the opinions of the inquirer. If Bultmann was right no conclusions will be possible at all. The feminist theologian Judith Ochshorn bravely applied to Jesus what Bultmann took to be axiomatic for the New Testament writers as a whole. “Jesus was neither a misogynist nor a feminist,” she writes, “his interests simply lay elsewhere.”23 Because the question of women’s ordination is necessarily being put in the context of a wider historical quest that rejects the divine origin and supernatural claims of the Jesus it strives to reveal, we need to ask what authority could its conclusions possibly have. Why should the attitudes to women of one peripatetic first century rabbi be more significant than those of another, and why should either be conclusive for us now? It would surely be absurd to seek to resolve twenty-first century issues by reference to a first century figure about whom so little can be known.

The most profound difficulty for a Christianity which seeks to be faithful to an historical moment is this problem of the miraculous. Christianity is not simply a religion which necessarily relates to past events (or to a privileged account of them); it is also a religion deeply committed to a belief in miracles. By that is meant, not merely a fascination with the remarkable and inexplicable (such as the miracles of Jesus—which, as has often been noted, are comparable with those of other contemporary wonder workers, and subject to the same criteria of credibility), but a commitment to a notion of divine action and intervention, determining both the course and significance of events. Christianity is essentially teleological: “the book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden, and ends with Revelations.” The dogmatic structure of the religion is crucially dependent upon the miraculous nature of the events surrounding the birth and death of Jesus. But, as anyone can see, belief in such divine interventions has been largely absent from the post-Enlightenment world and from the historiography that has developed within it. It has also markedly diminished in the mainstream Protestant churches. Churchmen of distinction have, sometimes scrupulously, sometimes flippantly, dissociated themselves from it. “I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange for a virgin birth if he wanted to,” said David Jenkins when he was Bishop-designate of Durham, “but I very much doubt that he would.” Later, in the same television appearance, he described the Resurrection as “a series of experiences” rather than an event. These statements, of course, prove nothing about how widely such views are held. What they do show, however, is that the opinions of Voltaire and Diderot are no longer any impediment to ecclesiastical preferment.

When did the age of miracle cease? For English speakers, at least, we can be fairly accurate. It was in 1758 when the publication of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding finally included the essay “Of Miracles,” which Henry Home had advised against publishing some years before. Hume defines miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” He develops a notion that had originated in disputes with the learned Jesuits of the college at La Fleche in Anjou during a stay in 1735:

. . . No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior.24

The Jesuits of La Fleche pointed out to Hume that his arguments (which had been principally directed against claims of recent miracles in their own community) were in fact arguments against the whole nature and tenor of Christianity itself. Hume tactfully moved away from the subject; but his interlocutors were right. The full implications of the dispute would unfold in the course of time.

The arguments of the Jesuits of La Fleche were precisely those of John Locke, whose short treatise “A Discourse of Miracles” (1701), Hume had been surprised to find in their college library. With daring circularity, Locke maintained that miraculous events give credibility to a divine messenger; and the divinity of the messenger confirms the miraculous nature of the events. Like a pair of revelers returning from a party, the two are sustained by mutual pressure: remove one and both fall into the ditch.

But the voice that caused the age of miracles to cease across the greater part of Europe was not a British voice. It was that of a deracinated Portuguese Jew from Amsterdam. Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza’s attitude to miracles differs radically from that of David Hume. Hume, famously, was making an epistemological point about what a person does or does not have reason to believe. Spinoza treats the matter metaphysically. For Hume a miracle is highly unlikely, to the point of incredibility; for Spinoza, “a miracle, either contrary to or above nature, is mere absurdity.” For a century or more, the name of Spinoza, and the accusation of “Spinozism,” was toxic among all but the most radical Enlighteners. His “one substance” doctrine was rightly seen by the majority as the root of religious and social subversion. It involved, in the end, a denial of the possibility of hierarchies, divine or social, and heralded the triumph of a radical democracy, which was seen by many as no more than license and anarchy.

An excommunicated, deracinated Amsterdam Jew of the seventeenth century seems, at first sight, an unlikely candidate to be the inspiration of a British post-Christian feminist of the 1980s. Spinoza has little or nothing to say about the cultic status of women (or men, for that matter); it was for him, of course, a total irrelevance. But his influence is to be felt nevertheless. Two elements of Spinoza’s program have especially influenced Hampson: his doctrine of miracles and his principles of scriptural exegesis.

At the same time as rejecting the miraculous, Spinoza demanded that scripture be read in precisely the manner adopted for other works of literature. Scripture, he thought, may (or may not) contain enduring ethical lessons and principles (the truth or utility of which will be determined by means other than traditional methods of exegesis); but the task of the interpreter should be restricted simply to determining, so far as possible, what the author meant to convey. Spinoza (rather wickedly) uses the reformation formula “sola scriptura” to define his position. The study of scripture “from scripture alone” means respecting the text itself, and the genius of the language in which it is written, and involving all other relevant factors, such as the social and political circumstances of its composition and the biographies of its authors. All this, which seemed outrageous in his own day, has become commonplace. Hampson takes it on board, with a clearer than usual view of its implications. Like Spinoza, she denies the very possibility of miracles (and, a fortiori, the incarnation and the atonement), and stresses the rootedness of the scriptural texts in the patriarchal, misogynist societies which gave them birth.

Now I am not myself a Christian because I do not believe that there could be this particularity. I do not believe, whatever I may mean by God, that it could be said of God that God was differently related to one age or people than God is related to all ages or people. God is something which is always available, however much people in some ages, or some people in each age, may appear to be more aware of God. To put this differently and more technically, I do not believe that the causal nexus of history, or that of nature, could be broken. That is to say I do not believe that there could be peculiar events, such as a resurrection, or miracles, events which interrupt the normal causal relationships persisting in history and in nature. I do not believe in uniqueness. Thus I do not for example think that there could be a human person (which Christians must proclaim) who stood in a different relationship to God than do all other human beings25.

At the same time, she accepts what has come to be the consensus of modern “questers”: that any search for an historical Jesus will uncover a character who is embedded in the patriarchal culture of intertestamental Judaism. The Bible was written by misogynists, for misogynists.

That the bible reflects a patriarchal world is clear. The majority of biblical figures, whether patriarchs, prophets, priests, disciples or church leaders, are male. The scriptures largely concern the interaction of men with one another and with their God. The central figure of the tradition for Christians, Jesus Christ, is of course male. A handful of women who play a part on the stage form the exception. Likewise parables and ethical sayings are largely directed to the world of men. But it is not simply that women are notable by their absence. When they are present they are present for the most part performing female roles as defined by that society.26

Unusually for a professional theologian, Hampson goes on to relate her radical a priori ethical position on the equality of the sexes to the doctrine of God (or god). Her god is like the cat that walks by itself: all places, all things, and all people are alike to it. It does not—it cannot—make distinctions or have preferences. Deus sive natura—God as Nature—as Spinoza expressed it, is the ultimate egalitarian. Hampson reached this position in the course of arguing—in Scotland at first, and later in England—for the ordination of women. “I worked all hours, sacrificing my career and my free time, for the cause of the ordination of women in the British Anglican churches.” The fruit of that work was the increasingly pressing realization that feminism (defined as a radical assertion of the equality of women and men) was incompatible with the Christian religion. How could a religion centered upon a God who became a man (worse still, a “Father” who sent his “Son”)—and one whose every sacred text and whose whole history was mired in perennial patriarchy—ever concede real equality to women? Hampson had come to see that her most deeply held convictions were a reason, not to embrace women’s ordination (she was at one stage an ordinand herself), but to reject Christianity.

Though described by Rowan Williams as “essential reading,”27 Hampson’s book was predictably less popular with those among whom she had labored so hard and so long. It received polite notices from hard-line feminists, but was side-lined by the rest. What Williams described as “disturbing clarity” about “the difficulties in reconciling any kind of Christian theology with feminist insights,” and proposing “far-reaching re-imagining of our language about God,” was less than good news to those who were still engaged in the battle for women priests and bishops. They knew that such talk was guaranteed to frighten the horses. They saved their scorn for another book appearing at much the same time and stating a similar case from an opposite position (What will happen to God by William Oddie).28 Theology and Feminism they damned with faint praise; perhaps because it revealed, pellucidly, what the campaign for women’s ordination really is—a belated and localized skirmish in the culture wars between Christianity and rationalist secularism which have been on-going since the mid-seventeenth century.

But Williams was right. Daphne Hampson’s case is made with alarming clarity. Any critique of the arguments used to secure the ordination of women, in the British Anglican churches and in the wider church, needs to take seriously the points she makes. Hampson treated the matter—whether women should receive ordination in the Christian churches—with the utmost seriousness. It is for her a question of truth and principle. The truth is the very nature and ethical tenor of the religion; the principle is the absolute and non-negotiable equality of women and men. The two, she concludes, are radically incompatible; and as a true heir of the Enlightenment, she opts for the latter. It is a choice that Christian feminists (especially, one is tempted to say, in the cosy seclusion of the Church of England) have seldom seen the necessity of making. The problem on which Christian feminists have turned their back is that of the intellectual origins of their own movement. The “scandalous particularity” of Christianity proves, in the end, to be incompatible with a worldview that espouses radical egalitarianism. To the old riddle “How odd of God to choose the Jews,” the radical egalitarian must necessarily answer that s/he didn’t, or—more to the point—that s/he couldn’t have. The “far-reaching re-imagining of our language about God,” of which Rowan Williams spoke, turns out to require the elimination of every last vestige of Christian doctrine. Incarnation, Atonement, Final Judgement, Hell and Heaven: all must go.

* * *

Strangely but predictably, there is much in common between Hampson’s radical post-Christian position and that of traditionalist opponents of women’s ordination. She rejects Christianity and they reject feminism, for the same reasons. Where Hampson parts company with her forebears in the radical Enlightenment is in her understanding of what she calls “concretion”: the embodiment of the essential ideas of the religion in lively and compelling images. Enlightenment thinkers were generally disposed to a reductionist view of religion. For them it was merely extravagant language about something else—something which could be simply stated and independently arrived at by rational argument. Spinoza, for example, seems to have held that the sum total of the teachings of Judaism and Christianity amounted to the rabbinical charge to love God and neighbor. The rest—the election of the Jews, the divinity of Christ—was mere persiflage. “Religion stands in no need of the trappings of superstition. On the contrary its glory is diminished when it is embellished with such fancies.” Thomas Jefferson famously encouraged Joseph Priestley to compile an edition of the gospels which excised the miracles and omitted the resurrection; and when Priestley reneged on the project, he did it himself. “I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”29

Hampson differs. She sees that kerygma cannot so readily be separated from mythos. And rather surprisingly, she quotes C. S. Lewis approvingly to that effect:

Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in Heaven” . . . Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. . . . But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable. . . . A child who had been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child.30

Hampson goes on to quote Austin Farrer, for whom the images are given in the same way.

“As for the terms in which St. Paul expressed it—well, there you are—he used any sort of figure that came to hand: he picked up a rhetorical metaphor from a cynic preaching in the market. . . . He would have been amazed to learn that subsequent generations would make such stuff the foundation of dogmas. We should strip off the fashions of speech; but keep the substance, of course.” . . . But what is the substance? It has an uncanny trick of evaporating once its accidents of expression are all removed. Now the thought of Christ Himself was expressed in certain dominant images. . . . These tremendous images . . . are not the whole of Christ’s teaching, but they set forth the supernatural mystery which is the heart of the teaching. . . . It is because the spiritual instruction is related to the great images, that it becomes revealed truth. . . . We have to listen to the Spirit speaking divine things: and the way to appreciate his speech is to quicken our own minds with the life of the inspired images. . . . Theology is the analysis and criticism of the revealed images. . . . Theology tests and determines the sense of the images, it does not create it. The images, of themselves, signify and reveal.31

Those familiar with his work will know that Farrer expands the same point, with characteristic depth of perception, in his English appreciation of Bultmann.

There are certain steps in demythicization which, being the elimination of puerile error, can be got through once for all and not repeated, but there is another sort of demythicization which never ends in this life because it belongs to the very form of our religious thought. When we pray, we must begin by conceiving God in full and vigorous images, but we must go on to acknowledge the inadequacy of them and to adhere nakedly to the imageless truth of God. The crucifixion of the images in which God is first shown to us is a necessity of prayer because it is a necessity of life. The promise of God’s dealing with us through grace can be set before us in nothing but images, for we have not yet experienced the reality. When we proceed to live the promises out, the images are crucified by the reality, slowly and progressively, never completely, and not always without pain: yet the reality is better than the images. Jesus Christ clothed himself in all the images of messianic promise, and in living them out, crucified them: but the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy. This is very God and life eternal, whereby the children of God are delivered from idols.32

For Farrer, as for Hampson, what is conveyed is certainly not identical with, but nevertheless is clearly shaped by, the concretion. Christ, fulfilling the archetypal images, is both King and Victim. But he is not less a king because he is a victim; for the Cross is the consummation of his reign. “Concretion,” Farrer is saying, is effected, not merely by employing the images; but by living and fulfilling them. Which is precisely what Jesus did and the Christian is called to do. It is the tragedy of the arguments in favor of women’s ordination that they have sloganized Galatians 3:28 and paid so little attention to the fifth chapter of the letter to the Ephesians. There, Paul portrays the marital bond as an acted parable of the divine love—of Christ’s love for the Church. Only when the imagery is put into action is its truth experienced and known. The existential reality is both sweeter and more bitter than the images of prophecy.

A similar idea is developed in Inter Insigniores, the declaration of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the question of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood, which was approved by Pope Paul VI on October 15, 1976 (less than a month after the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate).

[The incarnation] cannot be disassociated from the economy of salvation; it is, indeed, in harmony with the entirety of God’s plan . . . For the salvation offered by God to men and women . . . took on, from the Old Testament Prophets onwards, the privileged form of a nuptial mystery: for God the Chosen People is seen as his ardently loved spouse. . . . Christ is the Bridegroom; the Church is his bride, whom he loves because he has gained her by his blood.33

And traditionalists have made a related point by reminding exegetes that scripture is, to a large extent, narrative. It is itself a parable. That the principal protagonists in the tale are male cannot be said to be insignificant. Different protagonists, after all, would mean a different story.

The matter can be put succinctly: is it remotely imaginable that the foundational “story” of Christian tradition could revolve around a female savior, crucified on Calvary? Surely, whatever might be involved in such an event, it would be something quite different from the death of Jesus Christ. His sacrificial death not only fulfills the scriptural pattern (looking back to Joseph, to Isaac and, reaching back even beyond the inauguration of the covenant with Abraham, to Abel), it also resonates with human instinct and human experience in general.34

Hampson agrees:

Consider then the following. A book, edited by Hans-Ruedi Weber (until recently of the World Council of Churches), On a Friday Noon, shows illustrations of Christ crucified, drawn from all cultures and times in history. The variety is fascinating. There are yellow Christs and brown Christs, Christs who are serene and Christs in agony, Christs who are stylized and Christ in the image of the people who depicted him. But one thing these pictures—which reflect a spectrum of human art and imagination—have in common: they are all images of a man. If there were to be an image of a woman in that book, that one picture would stand out as the exception. However Christ is understood, as people take him up into their culture, or make of him what they will, they know him to be male. A woman is the “opposite” to Christ in a way in which someone of another race is not.35

The observation is simple and telling. Sex, says Hampson, is the great “cutting” of mankind (the Latin root means “to cut,” as in “section” and “secateurs”). It transcends cultural and racial boundaries and is deeply rooted in the facts of procreation. It is this common experience of sexual difference, located in biology and rich in cultural and literary associations, which allows the myth of Oedipus, for example, to speak to a nineteenth century bourgeois Jewish consulting-room in Vienna as well as in the furthest recesses of Hellenic history. Christian feminists often feel obliged to claim that the sex of Jesus is no more “soteriologically significant” than his Jewishness. The overwhelming evidence of human experience in every culture indicates otherwise.

This fundamental agreement between a post-Christian feminist and a catholic traditionalist—between Daphne Hampson and Austin Farrer—issues, of course, in the paradox of compulsion and expulsion. What drives her from Christianity is what he finds most compelling in it. At the same time, the common ground between them defines the task for those feminists who, for whatever reason, opt to remain in the Church. They cannot reject the miraculous and providential elements of the religion like Hampson; nor can they embrace and celebrate them, like Farrer. Instead they need somehow to demonstrate that what is providential is nevertheless inconsequential. And that is a tall order. They have attempted this in two ways. Either they have sought to minimize the significance of the “maleness” of the incarnation, or they have supposed that women’s ordination will in some way correct a current “imbalance” in religious imagery—will initiate a new “concretion,” as one might put it.

* * *

The first line of argument, seeking to minimize the “maleness” of Jesus, was starkly set out in a pamphlet published in England for the Movement for the Ordination of Women in 1990. It concluded with the sweeping statement: “that the risen and ascended Jesus has no gender.” Jesus was a boy child; but in heaven he has no sex. This ploy of locating the necessarily genderless Jesus in a cosmic Christ beyond the grave might at first seem ingenious. It even gains some support from a saying of Jesus himself about the risen life (Mark 12:25). But only a moment’s reflection is required to see that it is clear contrary to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, which hangs upon the identification between the earthly and the risen body of the Savior—a doctrine familiar to every worshipper from Wesley’s splendid Advent hymn:

Those dear tokens of his passion

Still his dazzling body bears

cause of endless exaltation

to his ransomed worshippers.

With what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars.36

What, we are entitled to ask, would a forensic pathologist make of a human body with identifiable scar tissue but no indicators of the sex of the deceased?

Dr. Susannah Cornwall, a research fellow at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, has boldly gone where no scholarship has gone before. In an article entitled “Intersex & Ontology: A Response to ‘The Church, Women Bishops and Provision,’” she is responding to a theological paper produced by the Evangelical think-tank The Latimer Trust. That Jesus was male, she claims, is “simply a best guess.” It is impossible to know “with any certainty,” she says, that Jesus did not have both male and female organs.

There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some “hidden” female physical features . . . There is simply no way of telling at this juncture whether Jesus was an unremarkably male human being, or someone with an intersex condition who had a male morphology as far as the eye could see but may or may not also have had XX chromosomes or some female internal anatomy. The fact that, as far as we know, Jesus never married, fathered children or engaged in sexual intercourse, of course, makes his “undisputable” maleness even less certain.37

But this uncertainty has, for Cornwall, some very certain consequences. It deprives the terms male and female, man and woman, of any useful content—so eliminating at a stroke the subject matter of the greater part of world literature. Nothing and no one can any more be manly or womanly. Cornwall’s claim, of course, is one which could be made, on the self-same grounds—that is, none at all—about every historical personage from Socrates to Adolf Hitler. I have not chosen these names entirely at random. Both might be thought to be a more fruitful subject for speculation than Jesus of Nazareth: with Socrates there are the accusations of corrupting youth; and with Hitler the familiar words to the tune of “Colonel Bogey.”

These rather ham-fisted attempts to geld Christianity’s Lord have probably been influenced by the American Episcopalian patristics scholar Richard A. Norris Jr. Norris, it need hardly be said, is a good deal more subtle. In a paper entitled “The Ordination of Women and the ‘Maleness’ of the Christ”38 (published in 1976, written when he was a professor at the General Theological Seminary, in the run-up to the ECUSA General Convention debate on women in the priesthood), he develops an argument from the use of metaphor in classical Trinitarian theology.

The very title of Norris’s piece is revealing in itself. The inverted commas speak volumes. Norris is clearly one who believes that sexual identity is largely, if not wholly, a social construct: that men and women are “the same thing with different fittings,” and that “humanity” in some sense subsists apart from or beyond sexual differentiation. “The Christ,” moreover, is a loaded term. It presupposes a clear divide between concept and person; between Jesus of Nazareth and “the Christ” of classical Christology. Norris wants to demonstrate that the Fathers shared the opinions of twentieth century liberal Christians about sex, and he does so by attacking, head-on, the idea that only a male can represent Christ at the altar as novel and dangerous. Like a clever undergraduate, he seeks cheekily to reverse received opinion: the present-day innovators prove to be the orthodox, and the conservatives the heretics. The notion that the Christian priesthood is male because it figures or represents a male savior, says Norris, is both modern and disturbing. “The argument is virtually unprecedented. It does not in fact state any of the traditional grounds on which ordination to presbyterate or episcopate has been denied to women. To accept the argument and its practical consequence, therefore, is not to maintain tradition, but to alter it by altering its meaning.” And he goes on to explain why. “The premises which apparently ground [the representative argument],” he claims, “. . . imply a false and dangerous understanding of the mystery of redemption—one which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would effectively deny the reality of Christ as the one in whom all things are ‘summed up.’”

All this is itself novel and unfounded. There is, as Norris must have been aware, a long tradition which speaks of the priest and bishop as representing God, Father, and Son. Ignatius of Antioch refers to the bishop as “type of the Father”;39 the iconoclast controversy of the seventh and eighth centuries debated at length whether and how, in his particularity, the Incarnate Son should be depicted and represented;40 and in the thirteenth century, Aquinas speaks of the priest as acting “in persona Christi.”41 There is, moreover, simply no evidence that Greek speakers of the third and fourth centuries shared Norris’s concept of undifferentiated humanity, and much evidence (assiduously assembled by feminist scholars) to the contrary. The use of “anthropos” and “homo” in the languages of the societies in which they are rooted (patriarchies where women were in every sense unenfranchised) simply does not add up to the “inclusive humanity” which Norris and others want. With Plato and Aristotle, the Fathers regarded the subordination of women as “natural”: women were unlike slaves in that they were free, but unlike men in that they were not politically active or competent. But there is more. What content, in any event, could the notion of “a Christ” possibly have, torn from its Judaic roots? The Christ the Fathers proclaimed is not merely a savior figure (Poseidon Soter, Zeus Soter, Dionysus Soter, Athena Soteira, Hecate Soteira, etc., etc.), but the sole fulfillment of messianic expectation: the Son of David. He is intelligible and identifiable only in terms of the cultural context from which he came and in which he lived. It is from that Jewish context that the maleness of Jesus derives its “soteriological significance.”

The notion that women’s ordination will in some way correct a current “imbalance” in religious imagery surfaces for the first time in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Bishop Paul Moore of New York, an early advocate of women’s ordination in that Church, argued that the “maleness” of the deity might in some way be mitigated by the presence of female ministers.

God as Father and God as Son invoked by a male minister during worship creates in the unconscious, the intuitive, the emotive part of your belief, an unmistakable male God. However, when women begin to read the Scripture, when they preside at the Eucharist, when they wear the symbolic robes of Christ, this unconscious perception will begin to be redressed and the femininity of God will begin to be felt.42

To this clumsy and confused thinking, Daphne Hampson provides us once more with a ready response.

The difficulty . . . was brought home to me some years ago in attending a eucharistic liturgy, which I believe had been written by Carter Heyward . . . Only women were present and the service was orientated towards women. In place of a sermon there was a time of quiet in which women present spoke to the theme of “creation,” some from the perspective of giving birth. How jarring it seemed then that, at the consecration, reference had necessarily to be made to the man Jesus of Nazareth: he had to take centre stage. Not simply was he mentioned, as men may well have been in the prayers of intercession, but he was actively made present as lord of the situation.43

She is again making a point which would not sound out of place in the mouths of traditionalist controversialists, Eric Mascall say, or V. A. Demant. Like Hampson, they would emphasise the anamnesis of Jesus, which lies at the heart of the catholic understanding of the eucharist. They would then go on to say, which might equally be thought to be implicit in Hampson’s account of the Heyward “eucharist,” that this necessary anamnesis is amplified and more fully expressed when the minister of the rite is himself a man.

* * *

Theology, it is sometimes said, is the only academic discipline in which primitive remains a term of approbation. So if the maleness of Jesus and its symbolic impact has proved to be problematic for Christian feminists, no less so has been their relationship with the biblical and Christian past. Of course, feminist problems in relating to a patriarchalist past are not exclusive to Christians. In a ground-breaking book on women and drama in the age of Shakespeare, Lisa Jardine summarized two differing responses:

There appear currently to be two main lines of approach to Shakespeare’s drama within a feminist perspective . . . The first assumes that Shakespeare has earned his position at the heart of the traditional canon of English literature by creating characters who reflect every possible nuance of the richness and variety which is to be found in the world around us. His female characters in this view reflect accurately the whole range of specifically female qualities . . . The second line of approach assumes quite the opposite. Shakespeare’s society is taken to be oppressively chauvinistic—a chauvinism whose trace is to be found in innumerable passing comments on women in the plays.44

For Shakespeare read Jesus—except that in the case of Jesus the two approaches have been melded into one, with a conspiracy theory to link them. Jesus was an egalitarian revolutionary, the theory goes, whose closest associates were so blinded by the ambient culture of misogyny that they could not grasp how radical he was. A male conspiracy, down the ages, has buried his insights under the dead weight of deepening patriarchy. Only in recent times has the truth about him come to light.

It is strange that Biblical scholars and Church historians have been slow to point out the near absurdity of all this. It is an axiom of social anthropology that in other cultures and former times, ethical assumptions which we make without question would have seemed outlandish and unintelligible. Imagine trying to explain the principles of the RSPCA to the clientele of the Colosseum. And yet the belief that a Palestinian rabbi of the first century (and later the greatest and most influential of his pharisaical converts) embraced a doctrine which was unknown before the eighteenth century Enlightenment and did not gain general credence until the 1920s has somehow passed virtually unquestioned.

Jesus, it is often said, was revolutionary in his attitude to women. Even the Roman Magisterium—eager no doubt to say something that might be construed as “positive”—has gone along with the notion.

[Jesus’s] attitude towards women was quite different from that of his milieu, and he deliberately and courageously broke with it. For example, to the great astonishment of his own disciples Jesus converses publicly with the Samaritan woman (cf. Jn 4:27); he takes no notice of the state of legal impurity of the woman who had suffered from haemorrhages (cf. Mt 9:20–22); he allows a sinful woman to approach him in the house of Simon the Pharisee (cf. Lk 7:37ff.); and by pardoning the woman taken in adultery, he means to show that one must not be more severe towards the fault of a woman than towards that of a man (cf. Jn 8:11). He does not hesitate to depart from the Mosaic Law in order to affirm the equality of the rights and duties of men and women with regard to the marriage bond (cf. Mk 10:2–11; Mt 19:3–9).45

These claims are the subject of the next chapter. They prove, as we shall see, insubstantial if not totally unfounded. But take the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman as an example. It is not a story about Jesus’s attitude to women—indeed there are no stories in the Gospels “about” Jesus’s attitude to women. It is not even a story “about” Jesus’s relationship with a woman. It is hard to see what comfort a feminist might gain from it. The metaphorical association of Woman with marital and spiritual infidelity (“whoring after strange Gods” [cf. Hos 1:2]) looks suspiciously like misogyny, and the oblique references back to the meetings at wells of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, have disturbing patriarchalist overtones. It is by no means certain, what is more, that the now famous ending to the tale (“. . . they [the disciples] marveled that he was talking with a woman”) can support the conclusion which has recently been drawn from it. The most natural inference, surely, is not that the disciples were amazed at what Jesus was in the habit of doing, but astounded that he had broken with the habits of a lifetime! If there is a lesson to be learned here it is about the difficulties inherent in seeking guidance from such texts on matters which they were never intended to address and which are strictly irrelevant to them. The fact that Christians have been dealing with texts in precisely that way for centuries is no excuse.

An older generation of feminists was right: for them the Bible is uncomfortable territory. Who, after all, could dispute the patriarchal credentials of the culture of the Old Testament, where male circumcision is the rite of entry into the community of Israel, where the cultic community was restricted to men, and where even sacrificial victims were required to be male (Lev 1:3)? And the same is largely true of the New Testament. “There is no positive evidence,” says Hampson, “that Jesus saw anything wrong with the sexism of his day.”46 And Nicola Slee provides some interesting statistics.47 Of the main characters in Jesus’s parables in Mark none are women; in Matthew there are eighty-five characters, of whom twelve are women (but ten are bridesmaids in one story!); in Luke there are 108, of whom nine are women. And this poor rating is capped, as traditionalists never tire in pointing out, by the appointment of the Twelve—patriarchs of the New Israel, and a missed opportunity if ever there was one.

For Christian feminists, what is more, Lisa Jardine’s two conflicting approaches represent the clash of two contrasting cultures. Because Christianity is an historical religion in which “primitive” remains a term of approbation, more than nominal respect must be accorded the historical record. But sexual egalitarianism, as we have seen, is a recent development with its origins in the ideology of the Enlightenment. Church feminists, in consequence, find themselves co-belligerents with a class of persons whose posture toward the past might best be described as arrogance mingled with anger. “Men (sic) will never be free,” wrote Denis Diderot, “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”48 They are not encouraging words for the priesting of women.

Much of the polemic against the Christian past marshalled by feminists has, in fact, been freely adapted from the writings of the radical Enlightenment. In Beverley Clack’s exhaustive anthology Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition,49 Tertullian, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas precede Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Rousseau. The irony is that much of the weaponry used against the former originated with the latter, and was part and parcel of their hatred of monasticism and contempt for celibacy. All this, it has to be said, is more prejudicial to their case than many Christian feminists have grasped. Christianity, as an historical religion, is essentially retrospective: it locates authority in past events. The Enlightenment project was essentially prospective: it looked to a progressively unfolding future. Anthony Pagden’s characterization is apt:

Unlike either the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment had begun not as an attempt to rescue some hallowed past, but as an assault on the past in the name of the future. “If a century could be described as ‘philosophical’ merely because it rejected the wisdom of past centuries,” wrote the mathematician and philosopher Jean D’Alembert “. . . then the eighteenth would have to be called the ‘century of Philosophy par excellence.’ It was a period which sought to overturn every intellectual assumption, every dogma, every “prejudice” (a favourite term) that had previously exercised any hold over the minds of men.50

Christian feminists need to be aware that association with those who entertain such contempt for the past (and the Christian past in particular) is worse than fraternizing with the enemy: it is tantamount to sawing off the branch on which they sit.

* * *

In feminist terms, the historical record is, as most secular feminists seem to agree, one of unbroken patriarchy and intermittent bouts of more or less serious misogyny. No age but the present is congenial to them. But there are those for whom such a bleak vision of the past is too much. If women and men are truly equal and in every respect socially equivalent things, they suppose, it must at some time have been more rosy. So the search was on. They persuaded themselves that in far flung places and at times far distant, things had been different: there must have been thriving matriarchal societies, which, alas fell in the course of time, to the rapacity of men. Primitive matriarchy, interestingly, was a speciality of Soviet and Chinese communist ideology. The Standard English language history of the People’s Republic of China,51 for example, begins with an account of matriarchal communities along the Yangtze valley around 2,500 BC. The claim is largely evidence-free (no explanation is offered of how such information could have been gleaned from the archaeological evidence). In less doctrinaire times it has been withdrawn. Christian feminists, as we shall see, have sought comfort in the speculative reconstruction of what have been called “the earliest Christianities,” “fragments of a faith forgotten” located a lost Golden Age, among the papyri of the Egyptian desert and in the fragmented records of Gnostic communities long dead.

More rationally, the question has to be why patriarchy endured so long and has been universal across cultures and continents. Is there, as some religious traditionalists have claimed, something “natural” or even inevitable about patriarchy? Is the scriptural imagery of a male God redeeming creation through the action of His Son grounded in a language written into the human genes and upon the human heart? Some modern theorists have concluded precisely that. Steven Goldberg’s book of 1977, The Inevitability of Patriarchy,52 with its exhaustive catalogue and systematic refutation of every recorded claim about the existence of matriarchal societies, was greeted with a predictable hail of criticism from left-leaning academe. More irritating to them still was a review of the first American edition, by the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Persuasive . . . accurate. It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed . . . Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home.”53

Goldberg’s thesis that social structures inevitably reflect and express essential biological, hormonal, and physical differences between women and men—despite its unpopularity in some quarters—has received a good deal of support in recent years from other analysts. The work of Simon Baron-Cohen54 squarely confronts the received wisdom (current at least since John Stuart Mill’s deeply flawed The Subjection of Women) that male and female are “social constructs.” In a rather less theoretical mode, Steven Rhoads makes a case for adapting social policy to take account of the basic differences of aim and outlook between women and men.55 He has shown, as one professor of anthropology tersely put it, that the “the Empress of androgyny has no clothes.”56

Matriarchy, like the existence of Amazons, has always been located more in the imagination than in reality—in the territory of Rider Haggard, rather than that of serious anthropology. It is becoming increasingly clear that the notion of a feminist Jesus and a first century world peopled with Christian women priests is similarly inventive. These things never existed except in the minds of those who desperately want them to be so. They are myths answering a pressing need. That mythology is the subject of the chapters which follow. This is a book about the tales people tell when precedent is needed in order to justify an action for which there is no precedent.

* * *

We begin, necessarily, with Jesus. There has been, over the years, a recurrent, and perhaps understandable, attempt to harness the Son of God to every passing social and political bandwagon. C. S. Lewis identified this as the “Christianity and . . .” syndrome.

My dear Wormwood,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.” You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.57

“Study the New Testament,” a Chartist newspaper, enjoined its readers in 1841, “it contains the elements of Chartism.”58 “. . . we are all priests,” exclaims a character in Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale (1869), “the workman is a priest like the founder of Socialism, the Master of us all, Jesus Christ!”59 Since the almost routine nineteenth century identification of Christianity with soft-edged socialism the notion has come a long way. (“Christianity and vegetarianism” was Lewis’s favorite.) The logic behind the syndrome is simple but fallacious: because Jesus was a Good Man he must necessarily have favored all that the protagonist thinks to be good. On grounds scarcely more sophisticated or informed, feminists have claimed him for their own. We need therefore to ask, “What did Jesus think about women?” And whether, in a modern analytical sense, he thought about women at all.

The chapter following deals with the claims repeatedly made about St. Paul. Feminists have always been in two minds about Paul. For a long time he was portrayed as an egregious example of the blanket misogyny of his era. Paul was said to be the crucial agent in the transformation of the counter-cultural, radically egalitarian “Jesus Movement” into an institutional church which oppressed women. The problem with this theory is the absence of any specific scriptural text establishing the alleged egalitarianism of Jesus. As we will see, Jesus never addresses the subject of the social or cultic status of women directly, and no firm conclusions can be drawn from his general conduct. This problem has been solved in a quite remarkable way. In a curious volte-face, Paul the hated misogynist was transformed into a feminist hero; and Galatians 3:28 has been drafted in to supply the pressing need for a biblical slogan. Of course, the mulier tacet texts (requiring women to stay silent), on which Paul’s previous reprobation had been based, remained. They were now regarded, not as incontrovertible proofs of Paul’s hatred of women, but either as later interpolations (by men who could not stomach the strong meat of Paul’s radicalism), or as undesirable elements in Paul’s own psycho-pathology (which the gospel values in him were struggling to suppress). Those who were in two minds about Paul had created an apostle in their own image; one who was in two minds about himself. The primary task of the exegete—to illuminate the text in its integrity in the light of its author’s culture, background, and known mentality—was set aside, and the concerns of an age far removed from his own arbitrarily imposed upon it.

Chapter 4 is devoted to Mary of Magdala. For a character to whom there are only thirteen references in scripture (most of them cognate and only one outside the Paschal narratives), the Magdalen has had a long and eventful career. Since her death she has been credited with being, amongst other things, a prostitute, a penitent, an early migrant to the Côte d’Azur, the scion of a royal house, and, of course, the wife of God and mother of his grandson. For none of this is there a shred of firm evidence. That fact might have been read as a warning against further unwarranted speculation, but not so. Recent books about her range from the relatively scholarly to the frankly barking. She has emerged in Christian feminist polemic as “apostola Apostolorum” (“apostle to the Apostles”). The claim is based on the assertion that Mary was the first to see the risen Lord, and was charged by Him to proclaim the resurrection to others. As we shall see, there is no unequivocal support in scripture for either claim. Nor is it clear what effect, if any, the truth of the assertion would have on the restriction of episcopal office to men.

The next chapter is a round-up of some of the more specific (and imaginative) evidence which has been adduced for women priests in the early years of Christianity. The Roman Catacombs and the Colosseum have a special place in the popular mythology of early Christianity. Featured in Hollywood blockbusters and historical novels, the truth is that neither lives up to its reputation. There is no evidence that Christians were ever martyred in the Colosseum; nor were the catacombs used either as hiding places or as places of regular worship. But the mystique lingers on. Ever since the attention of non-specialists was drawn to it by Joan Morris,60 a fresco in the Cappella Graeca in the so-called Catacomb of Priscilla has been a focus of misguided attention. Probably because of its resemblance to the most famous of all frescoes of the Last Supper (a group of figures at a table arranged to face the spectator), it has been claimed to be a representation of a concelebration of the Eucharist by women priests of the early second century. Or, according to another authority, Priscilla and Aquilla, that ubiquitous Pauline couple, celebrating the eucharist together with friends. All this is improbable in the highest degree. Representations of eucharistic celebrations are otherwise unknown in paleo-Christian art; concelebration is unheard of before the seventh century; and the fresco is dated by most authorities to the end of the third century, when Aquilla and his wife were long dead.

A mosaic in the chapel of S. Zeno in the titular church of Sta Prassede in Rome has been taken to be a portrait of a woman bishop, “Theodora Episcopa,” the mother of Pope Paschal I. Though she has left no other testament to posterity, Theodora has been celebrated by members of the Movement for the Ordination of Women with an eponymous cocktail (sparkling wine and pomegranate juice, in the style of the more familiar Bellini and suitably purple). Meanwhile, a former editor of The Catholic Herald has eked out a slim volume, and a subsequent television documentary, by retelling the hoary legend of Pope Joan, in which surely even he could not bring himself to believe.

* * *

Christianity is an historical religion. It is related to a particular historical moment. The radical critique of Baruch Spinoza (and the post-Christian feminism of Daphne Hampson) bases itself on two principles: the absurdity of miracles and the need to treat scripture in the critical, analytical manner adopted with regard to all other texts since the age of humanism. The paradox is that Christianity is a religion compelled by its denial of Spinoza’s first principle to the rigorous pursuit of his second. Its particular relationship to a moment in time requires of it the utmost rigor in apprehending that moment. To uncover “the Jesus of history” (as though there were some other Jesus who was in some way unhistorical) is, for Christians, to learn something of the mind of God. The Incarnation—the foundational miracle of the Faith—is precisely the place where event and revelation meet. The two are inseparable: he is both God and a man. God in Christ, as the fathers of the Seventh Council affirmed, can be (and must be) described or delineated—the verb they used was perigraphein. The Council wittily turned the tables on the vanquished iconoclasts: to claim that God is indescribable, they said, is to fall into the deadly danger of making Him in one’s own image—the very idolatry of which the iconodules had been accused. And, one might add, the crime of which Albert Schweitzer thought the questers after the “historical Jesus” were guilty.

Whilst Islam is the religion of an inviolable text and a single language, the characteristic activity of Christians is translation. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the gospels and epistles were written in Greek; a Latin translation mediated the gospel message to Western Europe; vernacular translations (especially into English and German) were crucial in the development of early modern language and culture. The temptation has always been to mimic Islam and to canonise a particular text at a particular time. It has wisely been resisted. Translation is a delicate and subtle process. It demands different qualities and responses at different times. Consider the manifold difficulties of transposing Racine into modern English verse. Translation requires a deep historical insight and a lively imagination. These qualities have been tragically lacking among liberal Christians sympathetic to the feminist challenge. In place of historical sensitivity they have substituted cultural imperialism. They have recreated the Christian past in their own image. The flagship in this regard has been the campaign for so-called “inclusive language” in Bible translation and in the liturgy. Secular feminists, of course, have been busily policing the pronouns (with a degree of success) for at least three generations. Whether the abandonment of allegedly offensive terms like “actress” and “usherette” effected or reflected changes in general attitudes is obviously open to question. The campaign, however, had at least the merit of restricting itself to censorship of the present: there have not, so far as I know, been “inclusive language” versions of Homer or Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Wordsworth. One can imagine the outrage in academe were such projects to be set in train. But there has been hardly a murmur from the academic community against the bowdlerisation of the Psalmist and the Evangelists by otherwise reputable Christian scholars, publishers, and institutions. The chapters which follow seek to show that this insensitivity to history is not restricted to language. It extends to include anachronistic and distorting conclusions in other areas. What the cult of “Inclusive language” has achieved in the realm of textual infidelity has, in these instances, simply been continued by other means.

19. Hampson, Theology and Feminisim, 8.

20. Vermes, Searching for the Real Jesus, 47–50.

21. Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 396–97.

22. Bultmannm, Jesus and the Word, 8.

23. Ochshorn, Female Experience and the Divine, 170.

24. Hume, Essays and Treatises, vol. 2, 115–16.

25. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 8.

26. Ibid., 91.

27. Ibid., blurb.

28. Oddie, What Will Happen to God?

29. Cappon, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 323.

30. Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?”

31. Farrer, Glass of Vision, 37–38, 42–43, 44.

32. Bartsch and Fuller, Kerygma and Myth, 222–23.

33. Sacred Congregation, Inter Insigniores, para. 2.

34. Baker, Consecrated Women, 14.

35. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 77

36. John and Charles Wesley (1758), adapted from John Cennick (1752), revised by Martin Madan (1760).

37. Cornwall, “Intersex & Ontology: A Response,” 15.

38. Norris, “Ordination of Women and the ‘Maleness,’” 71–85.

39. St. Ignatius of Antioch, Ad Trall, 3,1:SCh 10,96; cf. Ad Magn, 6,1:SCh 10,82–84.

40. See Schoborn, God’s Human Face, 133.

41. St. Thomas Aquinas, STh III,22,4c.

42. Moore, Take a Bishop Like Me, 37.

43. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 62–63.

44. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 1–2.

45. Sacred Congregation, Inter Insigniores, para. 2.

46. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 88.

47. Slee, “Parables and Women’s Experience,” 25–31.

48. Attributed to Diderot by Jean-François de La Harpe in Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne, 1840. A similar saying appears in Diderot’s posthumous Poesies Diverses, 1875.

49. Clack, Misogyny in the Western.

50. Pagden, Enlightenment: Why it still Matters, 26.

51. Shouyi and Yang, Outline History of China, 38.

52. Goldberg, Inevitability of Patriarchy.

53. Quoted on the dust jacket of the book in question, and by Goldberg himself in an article, “Feminism Against Science,” in the Journal of AIMHS.

54. Baron-Cohen, Essential Difference: Men, Women.

55. Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously.

56. Publisher’s blurb for Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously.

57. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 97.

58. Norman, Church and Society in England, 262.

59. Flaubert, Sentimental Education, 303.

60. Morris, J., Against Nature and God.