I can't take it anymore. Writing a dissertation in feminist theology is not supposed to threaten the very faith that brought me in to theology in the first place. Maybe it was a mistake to choose such masculinist theologians to write on, but I've always believed in facing the enemy headon and taking on the best of the bunch. Maybe trying to do systematic theology, without resorting to the intellectual shortcuts so beloved by the radical orthodoxy crowd, the projectionists, and all the rest of them, was the mistake. Of course leaving the beloved community to dissertate hasn't helped. But the dissertation is going well, relatively speaking - writing even gets done occasionally.
So why the despair? Well, today, in a fit of utter inability to write due to the meaninglessness of it all, I googled theology blogs again. Wow. In my head, I occupy a lovely space where all serious theologians recognize that the full inclusion of women into the life of the church is simply the greatest development of the last century, where the further recognition that then gender roles cannot be essential and set from all eternity, and therefore GLBTI people are fully included in the church is just like eggs or oatmeal at breakfast: obvious. I operate on a day-to-day basis, it seems, by simply ignoring some essential facts. 1300 Anglicans want to break out due to their resistance to women bishops. That's outside of the sillyness of the Jerusalem Declaration and all that mess. My own denomination of birth does not officially ordain women, although I've personally been sheltered from their worst excesses by various means (more on that later). And I tend to assume that the problem with Catholicism (from a Protestant perspective) is the papacy, primarily, and to simply pass over in silence the absurdity of the church's relation to women.
So I sat down to (try to) work today with all the optimism in the world. I have an article planned on the elision of gender in a very masculinist theologian that is supposed to show just how much stronger his own theology would look if he treated gender. But instead, like an idiot, I wanted to find out what was going on in the theological blogosphere.
First of all, radical orthodoxy? GET OVER IT. A more naked will to power in contemporary "hipster" theology would be hard to identify. Do those fools never ask themselves why Catherine Pickstock is pretty much the only woman they ever got on board, and not even really? Does it ever occur to them that it's not just the dominance of men in the academy that leads those Paul and Philosophy conferences to repeat the same tired platitudes with the same lineup of mostly boring white guys every time? And no matter what theory put into your puny heads: writing in a pretentious, circuitous, or condescending fashion does not, actually, make you deep. It makes you a div school boy. Have you been to div school?
Many divinity students are the absolutely most wonderful people imaginable. Having followed endlessly different paths in life, they feel called to ministry, to service, or just to spend a few years figuring some things out. They're awesome. Absolutely lovely. But then you have the div school boy. He graduated from some quasi-selective college (or sometimes Princeton) and was always somehow expected to be a star. He comes to div school thinking that here, among all these not-really-selected-elite students, he's going to continue to shine. To his horror, as always in grad school, a lot of other students are really smart too. Does this cause him to mend his pretentious condescending ways? Oh no! That would be impossible. Instead, he blathers on and on and tries to get more obscurantist and more orthodox or more whatever than everybody else. I've been in classes with these guys. They sit there, 10 in a row, all totally indistinguishable to me. I used to think maybe I had prosopagia (inability to recognize faces) but eventually I realized that they're all pretty much the same person. Some of them are very nice, of course. Some even very kind. But in general, they are so locked in their own worlds that the narrowness of their own thinking is almost impossible to point out to them. They're used to being able to run roughshod over the "poorer" students - the women, the minorities, the second-career students.
I've been convinced for years that I (oh blessed hubris - were I not afflicted, I could not diagnose so accurately) presented a challenge to their preconceptions. Having div school boys (the nicer kind) corner you in the hallways to tell you their shock at being confronted by a woman who talks better than they do will do that. I have thought to myself: I can take them on. The Holy Spirit is on this side, and we can create a new way of doing feminist systematic theology that is even more philosophically and systematically sophisticated than the old ways, without falling victim to their competitive and world-destroying practices.
But now, I think I was wrong. Perhaps the masculinist nature of Christianity goes so deep that they were right all along. Maybe the Son does submit to and obey the Father from all eternity. (Do they not see that construing the matter that way means enshrining competitive relations in God?) Maybe the crucifixion is the utmost expression of the Son's obedient submission. Maybe it's superficial to expect anything else.
In that case, I can't be a Christian. And that is the polar opposite of what this journey was intended to accomplish.
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