MISOGYNIES: THE VIOLENCE OF SILENCE

By Lyle Brecht

Ah, you who call evil good and good evil,

Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)1

Does “misogyny” describe anything more than the violence of using power to create
victims of women, because they are women? This power can manifest itself both
individually and structurally.2 The resulting violence usually takes three primary forms:
(1) the violence of immiseration due to material deprivation;3 (2) the violence in the
breakdowns of relationality; the breaking of the very connections that establish one as a
member of humanity;4 and (3) silence;5 “of being vetoed and nullified and cancelled so
that we have no say in the future of the community or of our own lives.”6 I would like to
propose that misogyny, racism, sexism, war, rape, torture, and globalization7 all have a

1
Walter Brueggemann, Texts that Linger Words that Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 22. What Isaiah is describing is disengagement (from reality)
as a “strategy of power and domination.” See Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in
an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 125.
2
This violence “is not simply the result of human actions, but the consequences of huge systems
over which no individual has full control.” See Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a
New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 31.
3
More than 1 billion people were without clean water in 2004; 2.6 billion people worldwide are
without access to proper sanitation. See “Progress for Children Report” (September 28, 2006)
UNICEF. Approximately three billion of the earth’s population “live on less than $2 a day; with
some 1.2 billion living in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day.” See J. F. Rischard, High Noon:
20 Global Problems; 20 Years to Solve Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 6, 8.
4
Torture and the Shoah (Holocaust), liturgies of state power over bodies and souls, are the natural
consequences of the violence inherent in the breakdown of relationality.

5
“Anamnesis” is exactly the converse of “silence” in the particularness of its remembering and
vocal re-enactment of encounter with the truth of this remembered event in the present. “Each
faithful truth-process is an entirely invented immanent break with” business-as-usual. See Alain
Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 44.
6
Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian
World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 6-7.
7
Globalization is included in this list of misogynies as it represents the imposition of a
phallocentric worldview of economic life that operates with the premise that everything is for
sale. The violent result is the creation of feminized victims (those others who are excluded)
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family resemblance. They are all misogynies. They all describe power relations where the
Other is feminized,8 whether that Other is a person, a group of related persons, or even a
whole society.9 The Other “is not even allowed the status of being innocent or guilty. One
is classified… as radically defective,” as less-than, and deficient just by one’s being. The
misogynist becomes “all too adept at claiming the body and mind of [his] victim, of
dominating the victim’s consciousness, or reducing it to a pure delirium” of self-
questioning of the goodness of the victim’s Self. The misogynist has essentially
attempted to turn the victim into a Häftling, a prisoner or Nameless One whose internal
state reflects an autonomy and freedom that has been crushed.10

Mary Daly believes that the “secret bond that binds [misogynists – those committing
misogynies] together, energizes them, is the violation of women, acted out physically and
constantly re-played on the level of language and of shared fantasies…. [a] perpetual War
is waged primarily on a psychic and spiritual plane, involving ‘symbolic universes in
thought, language, and behavior.’ These universes are present in each concrete violent act
of aggression.”11 The feminized Other (women, and men who are not victimizers) are
essentially living in a State of Fear within a War State. George Gilder describes the

through the misuse of economic power: the privatization of communal wealth, the criminalization
of poverty, the ghettoization of the commons that renders community impossible, and the
extinction of the relational Self. See Bauman, 121-2; Vanda Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice,
Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 2-3.
8
Feminized is used to here to reflect a gender role opposite to the “ideal” male role. This
feminization is accomplished through silencing and splitting of the Other from solidarity with her
support group “by the embedding of fears. These contrived and injected fears function in a
manner analogous to electrodes implanted in the brain of a victim (‘patient’) who can be managed
by remote control. This is a kind of ‘silent’ control (as silent as the pushing of a button).” See
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 19.
9
Emmanuel Levinas might say an Other is someone whom we are afraid to look at their face. For
if we did we would notice that they too are human; different, but just like us. “It is the
summoning of myself by the other (autrui), it is a responsibility toward those we do not even
know.” See Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel
Levinas (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 81.
10
See James Hatley, Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 16, 19, 23, 137.
11
Daly, 357; Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett,
1973), 212, note quoted in Daley, 357.
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conditioning of male victimizers within this War State describing his experiences at a
Marine Corps boot camp:

From the moment one arrives, the drill instructors begin a torrent of misogynist and
anti-individualist abuse. The good things are manly and collective; the despicable are
feminine and individual. Virtually every sentence, every description, every lesson
embodies this sexual duality, and the female anatomy provides a rich field of metaphor
for every degradation.
When you want to create a solidary group of male killers, that is what you do, you kill
the women in them. That is the lesson of the Marines. And it works.”12

What this War conditioning translates to on the battlefield can be seen in this eyewitness
account:

“Shit started to go bad right away,” an infantry fire team leader in the 82nd Airborne later
told Human Rights Watch, looking back at September 2003. Beating prisoners until they
passed our collapsed quickly became routine at his outpost near Fallujah, Forward
Operating Base Mercury, he said. “To ‘fuck a PUC’ [for person under control, and
pronounced ‘puck’] means to beat him up,” he recalled. “We would give them blows to
the head, chest, legs, stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every
day.” These attacks weren’t inflicted to collect intelligence but simply to blow off
steam.13

The lies that perpetuate misogyny are “the lies men tell about women…. Men who
believe women are dangerous, dishonest, provocative, and disquieting, that they must be
controlled or they will do terrible damage to men.”14 With this conditioning of men, the

12
George F. Gilder, Sexual Suicide (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 258-9 quoted in
Daley, 358. “A key element of this identity is their distance, their separateness from women.” See
Joan Smith, Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989,
1992), 154-5.

13
Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin
Books, 2006), 278.
14
Smith, 206. Although John Stewart Mills was writing about the poor at the beginning of the
Industrial Age, his prevailing mood sums up the paternalism that fuels misogyny, as “women who
are free cannot be trusted” and must remain under continuous surveillance, if one substitutes
women in the place of the poor:

The lot of the poor [read women], in all things which affect them collectively, should be regulated
for them, not by them… It is the duty of the higher classes [read men] to think for them, and to
take responsibility of their lot… [in order that] they may resign themselves… to a truthful
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“War State’s symbolic universes not only attack the Female Self as the Enemy, but also
continually guise and dis-guise this fact.”15 All to keep us numb, to keep us silent. But
misogynies exist and continue today due to our silences. A silence of betrayal where
“Faces disappear in the world-betrayed, because no one listens.”16 Katherine Keller
claims that misogyny is the “most widespread form of violence on (and to) the planet.”17
By remaining silent, doesn’t misogyny become ontology – “a way of being and of
understanding being.”18

A break from this silence, from the dominant consciousness of misogyny, only really can
“occur [] when women’s concrete power is manifest, when [] women live and act as full
and adequate persons in [their] own right.”19 The break from this silence, from the never-
ending cycles of violence and counter-violence,20 will come “from below in the daring
speech of the silenced” who cry-out, “speaking the truth amidst power.”21 The speech

insouciance, and repose under the shadow of their protectors… The rich [read men] should be in
loco parentis to the poor [read women], guiding and restraining them like children.

See John Stewart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, vol. 4 (London: John W. Parker and Son,
n.d.), ch. 7 quoted in Bauman, 31-2.
15
Daley, 362.
16
Hatley, 77.
17
Catherine Keller, “Of Swallowed, Walled, and Wordless Women,” Soundings Vol. LXV, No. 3
(Fall 1982) 328.
18
Keller, 337. Essentially, a fixed form of engagement with Reality (Bauman, 33).
19
Beverly Wildung Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love: Christian Ethics for
Women and Other Strangers,” in Ann Loades, ed., Feminist Theology Reader (London, SPCK,
1990), 196.
20
Rene Girard claims that the founding myth of human society is that violence itself has the
power to bind us together in society. But that violence always leads to never-ending cycles of
counter-violence and darkness. Only in the remembered New Testament narrative of the
crucifixion of an innocent victim is the world’s darkness transformed into revelation. That
revelation is that humanity no longer needs to sacrifice innocent victims in order to survive and
prosper. See Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad
Publishing, 1997), 153.
21
Brueggemann, Deep Memory, 7. The type of “power” referred to here is the power of control
and dominion over the Other. It is a power that creates victims. Often this speaking truth to power
is experienced as our speech “bear[s] testimony to a hope which both incorporates and transcends
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that is being called for is that of “deliberative witness in which the trauma of the other’s
suffering is”22 noticed, and the Other is acknowledged “as someone who ought to be
listened to, as someone whose address commands an answer, even if the answer is a
refusal to answer.”23 Such speech will always contradict the dominant narrative of the
principalities and powers;24 the purveyors of a royal consciousness whose aim is to
render us numb and blind to the violence in our midst;25 the violence being done to our
loved ones and us as we silently go about our daily routine.

Thus, our primary job as preachers of the Gospel, of ministers of the Word, rather than
that of maintaining institutions or stewarding church buildings and grounds, is, at the
very least, to model speech that breaks the silence of violence and the violence of
silence.”26 Just as “Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his
compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become
business as usual,” so too are we called.27 “Like Jesus, we are called to a radical activity

the possibilities and responsibilities inherent in the situation.” See Douglas John Hall, Thinking
the Faith: Theology in a North American Context (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989), 115.
22
Hatley, 139. My own utterance I will not restrain; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit (Job
7:11a).
23
Hatley, 77.
24
For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the
authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil
in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12). Powers was used by Saint Paul to refer to both the powers of
Sin and Death, and to the “imperial power of Rome [which was based] on a system of ‘political
tyranny and economic exploitation,’ founded on conquest and maintained by violence and
oppression.” See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity,
Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 296.
25
The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is
the task of the prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of
newness that is at work in our history with God. See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic
Imagination, 2nd Edition (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2001), 59-60.
26
Brueggemann, Deep Memory, 7. The aim of this speech “is to practice a language which does
not deceive or conceal, does not use its direct meaning as part of some hidden rhetorical strategy
or argumentation.” See Stavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: or what is the Christian legacy worth
fighting for (London, Verso, 2000), 139.
27
Jesus models for us “the faithful embodiment of an alternative consciousness” (Brueggemann
2001, 91). For example, “if Jesus really is the word of God, then it is not the mere ‘extrinsic’
knowledge of this which will save us, but rather a precise attention” to living out the values
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of love, to a way of being in the world that deepens relation, embodies and extend[s]
community, passes on the gift of life…. To break through the ‘lies, secrets and
silences.’”28 Christ, in his cruces (cross) redeemed us from the necessity to create
victims.29 Isn’t this alternative consciousness, of being-in-the-world without creating
victims what a just-making presence looks like? And isn’t this just-making presence the
“constant task of the people of God in any time and all times”?30

Yet, how can we be prophets in a post-Christian age?31 “Why were the prophets able to
face what they knew, and then to pronounce it with such overwhelming power?32 Might

embodied in our historical remembrance of Jesus that propel human history. For the telos of this
human history for Christians, is the kingdom of God here on earth as the Synoptic Gospels so
clearly attest. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), 385.
28
Harrison, 210. There are three fundamental questions that we, as ministers of the Word and
preachers of the Gospel, need to be able to answer in each specific situation that calls for truthful
witness: (1) “Is this the right thing for Christians to say and do?”; (2) “How does one distinguish
between what is Christian and what is not?”; and (3) “How can one characterize the relationship
between one’s Christian commitments and one’s allegiances as a member of the wider society?”
See Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Guides to Theological
Inquiry; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 94-5.
29
As Kenneth Leech reminds us: “Christianity goes disastrously and dangerously wrong when
Jesus is worshipped but not followed…. To follow the way of the cross is to enter into a
relationship of tremendous power and strength of action…. the good news proclaimed by Jesus
was about liberation, and this good news was to be embodied in a new community, the Kingdom
of God, a new age of relationships. It was good news of transformation, of reversal of fortunes, a
message not about a private salvation of soul, but about corporate righteousness. To be a
Christian is to be part of this new community – a community which is committed to the pursuit of
righteousness.” See Kenneth Leech, We Preach Christ Crucified (Cambridge: Cowley, 1994), 53,
54, 57.
30
Joseph Monti, “A Just-Making Presence: Worship and the Moral Life,” in J. Neil Alexander,
ed., With Ever Joyful Hearts: Essays on Liturgy and Music Honoring Marion J. Hatchett (New
York: Church Publishing, 1999), 354.

31
Train us, Lord, to fling ourselves upon the impossible, for behind the impossible is your grace
and your presence; we cannot fall into emptiness. The future is an enigma, our road is covered by
midst, but we want to go on giving ourselves, because you continue hoping amid the night and
weeping tears through a thousand human eyes. – Luis Espinal, a priest murdered in Bolivia for
his ministry with the poor. Quoted in Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of
the Innocent, trans. by Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 91-2.
32
As Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in a sermon delivered November 6, 1956: “I still believe
that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The
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“Their power [have] sprung from the fact that they did not really speak of the foundations
of the earth as such, but of Him who laid the foundations and would shake them….”33
Can we even rely on Scripture, with its deeply paternalist turn to help us live out a just-
making presence? Tikva Frymer-Kensky believes so:

Contrary to all assumptions – my own included – the Hebrew Bible, unlike other ancient
literature, does not present any ideas about women as the “Other.” The role of women is
clearly subordinate, but the Hebrew Bible does not “explain” or justify this subordination
by portraying women as different or inferior. The stories do not reflect any differences in
goals and desires between men and women. Nor do they point out any strategies or
methods used by women that are different from those used by men who are not in
positions of authority. There are no personality traits or psychological characteristics that
are unique to women, and the familiar Western notions of “feminine wiles,” “the battle
between the sexes,” “sisterly solidarity,” and “sex as a weapon” are all absent, as are any
discussions of the nature of women. There are no negative statements and stereotypes
about women, no gynophobic (“women-fearing”) discourse. The only misogynist
statement in the Bible comes very late in biblical development, in the book of
Ecclesiastes, and shows the introduction of the classical Greek denigration of women into
Israel.34

As we move to the New Testament, isn’t the Gospel ultimately a message of hope set
against a background of political disaster and immense human suffering? And didn’t
Jesus, in his ministry and his teachings, demonstrate what we silent ones “must always
learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping
permits newness.”35 The wailing one hears for the ending of misogyny will be from men,
for their loss of hegemonic power, and from women, who have prospered in their silence.
But this speech of anguish for endings must occur to make room for new beginnings. For
only with such anguished weeping, such crying-out of radical criticism for the twisted
ontology of misogyny and newly spoken deep desire for human liberation, can a

end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of
life is to do the will of God, come what may.” See James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 10.
33
Paul Tillich, “The Shaking of the Foundations,” in Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the
Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 9.
34
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002),
xv-xvi.
35
Brueggemann 2001, 57.
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dismantling of the royal consciousness (a consciousness of misogyny that results in

institutionalized violence and silence) take place.36

As ministers of the Word and preachers of the Gospel, we are all being called to cry-out:
“No more victims!” As ministers of the Word and preachers of the Gospel – our cry for
human liberation needs to be heard over the deafening silence. Anything less is Sin:
separation from the Other, separation from our selves, and separation of humankind from
our ground-of-Being.37 Yet we live in a post-Christian world. A world that is defined by
its fragmentation and its alienation. A world where identity-politics separates; is designed
to separate one from the Other “into smaller and smaller (and less and less effective)
groups.”38 Scripture offers a strong contrary claim: that separation is Sin. Maybe women,
in particular, can reclaim the power of their speech “when they band together.”39 What
we need today is an in-breaking of speech that cries out for a new kind of power; “the
power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, and the creative
dynamism of the will to love and to build, and the will to forgive. The will for
reconciliation” with our neighbor (the Other), our Selves, our God, and God’s good
creation.40 It is time for a Being-in-the-world without misogynies, without using our

36
What is at issue is whether our grief “can be audible and visible enough…to permit God’s
newness” to be revealed in His creation and His History. Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful
Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 14, 42.
37
Tillich, 154-55. “‘Sin’ is one way to name the plagued efforts of human agency” that attempts
to rely on its own hubris rather than “‘the power and wisdom of God.’” See Reinhold Niebuhr,
“Ten Years that Shook My World,” Christian Century, Vol. 56, No. 17 (April 26, 1939) 545
quoted in Larry Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (London: Collins
Liturgical Press, 1989), 18.
38
Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Whispering the Word: Hearing Women’s Stories in the Old Testament
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 88.
39
Lapsley, 88. “[S]o it is essential for women amongst themselves to invent new modes of
organization, new forms of struggle, new challenges” See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not
One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165-6 quoted in Penelope
Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 11.
40
Lisa Sowle Cahill, Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 222.
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power to create victims. For the “Kingdom of truth [Jesus] came to proclaim was the
kingdom of freedom and therefore cannot rest on pillars of violence.”41

Could the primary task of ministry today be to “to bring to public expression those very
hopes and yearnings [for God’s creation and the liberation of all humankind] that have
been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know that they are
there.” Most importantly, maybe it is only through our “public expression of hope as a
way of subverting the dominant royal embrace of despair” 42 that our human community
will find the imagination to ensure the survival of humanity and the planet Earth.

Might this poem accurately describe what being ministers of the Word and preachers of
the Gospel feels like in a post-Christian world:

we know no rule
of procedure,

we are voyagers, discoverers

of the not-known,

the unrecorded;
we have no map;

possibly we will reach haven,

heaven
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle),
From “The Walls Do Not Fall,”
Trilogy43

For we are not peddlers of God’s word

like so many;
but in Christ we speak
as persons of sincerity,
as persons sent from God
and standing in his presence.
(II Cor. 2:17, NRSV)44

41
Volf, 272.
42
Brueggemann, 1986, 65.
43
Daley, 386.
44
Quoted from Joe Monti, “Christian Social Ethics: Church and Society Syllabus” (Fall 2006),
21.
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Excursus: The Theology of Feminism as Cultural Hygiene Clearing the Way

for Speech that Heals Victims45
Christian feminist theology is based on a form of theological interpretation46 done from the
perspective of eschatological essentialism: (1) God-relatedness is a “determinant feature of our
being” and (2) “God wills that women (along with all people) flourish, and that as people of faith,
Christians are called to follow God’s will and seek out conditions for that flourishing, all the
while recognizing the limits of sin and the need for the Holy Spirit…. [affirming] the power of
grace, the reality of hope, and the possibility of conversion” in a world that is ‘already/not yet’
the world as it “might be.”47

Example #1: Traditionally, justification (Luther) describes what God does to redeem humanity in
Jesus Christ: (1) the crime of humanity is turning away from God and arrogantly conforming life
to destructive human desires rather than the divine will manifest in the law (bondage of the will);
(2) God shows divine mercy to an otherwise unrighteous humanity (imputation of righteousness);
(3) the sinner hears the divine verdict of forgiveness and comes to faith and knows he is saved by
a grace not earned but imputed through Christ. The justified sinner then enters into a lifelong
process empowered by the Holy Spirit for service to neighbor and faithful obedience to God
(sanctification, regeneration; Calvin) where God initiates real, internal transformation and the
believer’s life is materially (not just judicially) remade to “imitate” Christ.

Feminist Theory begins by positing that women suffer from an illness different from Luther’s
classical sinner: the source of her alienation from God is her lack of self-definition; she enters the
courtroom as a de-centered subject undone by falsely inscribed relations of power and whose lack
of self is her prison. Feminist Theology would say that to narrate conversion in woman’s lives

45
“Feminism as cultural hygiene” is from Keller, 328.
46
With theological interpretation, one uses “Scripture as a way of ordering and comprehending
the world, rather than using the world as a way of comprehending Scripture” as the historical
critical method of interpreting Scripture does. See Stephen Fowl, “Theological and Ideological
Strategies of Biblical Interpretation,” in Michael J. Gorman, editor, Scripture: An Ecumenical
Introduction to the Bible and Its Interpretation (pre-publication edition, 2004), 10.6.
47
Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace, Guides to
Theological Inquiry (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 51-5, 93. Feminist theology is a
theology of resistance and hope.
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more meaningfully, the story of God’s judgment and mercy should be reversed – starting w/
sanctification and its language of building-up instead of justification and its language of undoing.

The feminist theologian proclaims that “God desires to empower and liberate women rather than
to break what little self-confidence they have” as “sanctification provides doctrinal grounds for a
logic of identity that counters views of woman’s nature that undermine her agency.” Instead, she
is an embodied “agent shaped by her mission to love God and live in relation to neighbor” fully
present and inhabiting her world. “Justification means forgiving the sins of constructions that
bind us, so that, through God’s mercy, we may be open to the crafting work of the Holy Spirit.
For women formed by restrictive conceptions of gender, this act of person-crafting forgiveness
signifies new life….Conversion to faith is when one is forgiven because of God’s imputation of
an alien righteousness, a performance conversion in which we receive a new role, one that calls
us to live as those loved by God. One effect of this new vision: we begin to see that the usual way
of doing things is itself a series of performances that, in sin, we have raised to the status of
essential truths. God challenges the ‘as usual’ quality of the roles we had previously played in our
brokenness…and offers a new performance, one in which women become performers of Christ’s
imputed righteousness….The wonder she knows in receiving God’s grace in justification opens
her to neighbor and God”48

Example #2: The dominant interpretation of Sin is that it is an inherited (Augustine), pervasive
condition of falling short, missing-the-mark, unfaithfulness to the will of God affecting the
interiority of humans and exhibited in a variety of primary forms: pride (Calvin); sloth (Barth);
concupiscence (Tillich and Niebuhr). Applying a deconstructionist reading of the text, Feminist
Theory begins by positing that women suffer from sin differently than the classical view of sin:
the source of her alienation from God is her oppression by falsely inscribed relations of power,
and her resulting lack of self-relatedness separates her from God. This sin of hiding means that a
“woman has accepted the name of ‘Other’….she has trained herself to live a submerged
existence, she has hidden from her full humanity.”49

48
Jones, 62, 65, 66-8.
49
Susan Nelson Dunfee, “The Sin of Hiding: A Feminist Critique of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Account
of the Sin of Pride,” Soundings 65 No. 3 (Fall 1982) 321-2.
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Feminist theology suggests that instead of exclusively focusing on sin as an interior state of
fallenness, sin might be also characterized as a relational process whereby we subject the Other to
oppression, and if someone (or system) is oppressing us, we acquiesce and do not resist this
oppression.50 Since God-relatedness is a “determinant feature of our being” and “God wills that
women (along with all people) flourish”51 sin is the constructions that bind us, so that, we are
separated from God’s mercy and grace, closed off from the crafting work of the Holy Spirit, and
thus fall short of our mission to love God and live in relation to neighbor. The advantage of this
‘reading’ of sin is that it directly addresses the oppression women experience and does not
contribute to ways of understanding humanity’s relationship with God that are then used to keep
women from flourishing.

The Counter-Misogynies Speech of Men

The anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson, thinks that the survival of humanity and of
the earth depends on the ascension of women to positions of power. She believes this
because women, by their biology and socialization, think in terms of the long-view.52
Men, with their short-term thinking, are the architects of the War State, with its trillion
dollar annual budgets, armories bristling with nuclear weapons, and armies poised in a
state of readiness to fight the next war. What is required from men are new kind of
ethical responsibilities that include a long-term commitment for kenotic speech that not
only names the misogynies but also relinquishes male perquisites and power.

50
Jones, 94-125, 194.
51
Jones, 51-5, 93.
52
“Mary Catherine Bateson: A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers,” PBS Video (1988). Even
leading business theorists like Tom Peters make the same point in his Re-Imagine! Business
Excellence in a Disruptive Age (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2003).