By BRYAN PATTERSON

30apr06

God is definitely out of the closet — Marianne Williamson

AMERICAN journalist Barbara Walters once did a story on gender roles in Afghanistan under the Taliban and noted women customarily walked about five paces behind their husbands. After the Taliban was ousted, Walters returned to Kabul and observed women walked even further behind their husbands.

She approached one of the Afghani women and said: “Why do you now seem happy with an old-fashioned custom that you used to try to change?”

“Land mines,” the woman said.

Perhaps proving, once again, women are more logical than men.

But are they equal in the eyes of God?

You might not think so, given the struggle for women in many churches to take roles equal to men.

According to Christian tradition, three women close to Jesus saw him take his last breath at the crucifixion. Most of the male followers had already fled.

Jesus first showed himself in resurrected form to one of the women, Mary Magdalene.

There is much evidence of women being leaders in Jewish and Christian circles.

Jesus had men and women followers, and treated them as equals. The letters of Paul suggest women served as dynamic leaders, with roles including deacons, apostles and missionaries.

That’s something plenty of males have tried to ignore. Just as they have ignored the fact that early priests could marry.

In its early years, Christianity fought against harsh Roman laws under which women were considered non-citizens with few legal rights.

Women who committed adultery were punished and men were not.

The early Christian message demanded men and women were equal under God’s law. But many in the church eventually lost the plot on that one.

Throughout history women experienced mystical encounters with God and contributed much to art, literature and theology.

But church leader Tertullian felt compelled to describe women in the 3rd century AD as “the devil’s gateway”.

By the late third century, celibacy became a major life choice for many Christian women, leading to fears among men in the church that women’s independence could undermine the fabric of home and society.

Augustine, probably the most famous theologian in all of church history, believed God created the woman for no reason other than procreation.

It wasn’t only Christians who thought that way. Much earlier, Aristotle believed women were irrational in relation to men and unequal in virtue.

Catholic priests were always male because, they said, Jesus was. But that theology always seemed man-made rather than God-ordained.

Samuel Johnson, a Protestant, didn’t like women in the pulpit either.

He said “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

Advocates for women’s ordination say that an all-male priesthood denies women who are also made in the image of God.

Writer Joan D. Chittister said feminism was asking men to “wake up and see what’s missing in the picture — in themselves — and to devote themselves for the first time in history to the wholesale countenance of brain over brawn, of love over hate — the only weapons women have ever had”.

Writer Rosemary Radford Ruether said God’s wisdom was what we’re talking about when we referred to the feminine divine in Christianity.

It’s something the Jews knew, too. Jewish scholars developed the concept of wisdom as the feminine aspect of God about six centuries before Jesus.

Solomon described wisdom as being “like a fine mist, she rises from the power of God, a pure effluence from the glory of God”.

A FEMININE image of God has long been a part of the Christian tradition, although often obscured.

The Bible says God made man and woman in his image.

So Michelangelo surely missed the point, at least theologically, when he depicted God in his Sistine Chapel paintings as a bearded, white-haired old man.

The whole issue of God’s gender inspires other intriguing questions.

For example, could the Virgin Mary have given birth to a female saviour?

Given there is an equal capacity in male and female for authentic expression of divinity, there is probably no major theological problem in a female Jesus.

It would surely have made the current issue of women’s ordination less problematic.