"Time Is on My Side"

Mary Daly, Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. 288pp. $24.00 (hardcover).

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. 366pp. $20.00 (paper).

The liquor store around the corner from my apartment has in its window a digital sign counting down in rapidly moving milli-seconds to the year 2000. [1] A friend of mine is developing a class on time and millennialism in the New Testament. The terrors of Y2K appear as a motif in television commercials for cars, insurance, soda-pop. As the twentieth century and the second millennium of the common era draw to a close, we all, in different ways, have time, history, and change on our minds. This cultural preoccupation forms a link between the otherwise very different books under review here. Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether each conjures her own vision of time as that in which the feminist project finds its "home."

Ruether begins Women and Redemption with a series of pointed questions about the meaning within the Christian tradition of the Christian claim (Galatians 3:28) that "in Christ there is no more male and female" (1). An organizing presupposition of the book is that this claim has been interpreted differently at different times in Christian history, and, furthermore, that the various interpretations "are relative to the way women are defined in creation or 'original nature' and the 'fall' or the consequences of sin" (1). Ruether's project is to trace the relationship in history between changing paradigms of gender and changing interpretations of sin and redemption.

Beginning with the New Testament and ending with a survey of contemporary feminist theologies, Ruether presents certain key eras within the Christian tradition by focusing on the lives and works of representative figures. The first section of the book deals with the conflicting interpretations of gender and redemption in the earliest Christian churches and the development of the "orthodox" theological syntheses of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine in the late-fourth and fifth centuries. Ruether's aim in this section is to historicize the notion of "orthodoxy":

We can only glimpse a time when a great variety of Christianities, some experimenting boldly with the personal and social changes and theological interpretations of redemption, not only competed with emerging clerical and patriarchal forms of Christianity, but in many places were the predominant forms of Christianity. These, just as much as those who won as the "orthodox," saw themselves as building on ancient traditions going back to Jesus and the first generation of his followers. (51)

The movement Ruether traces is one from an original situation of diversity toward a growing monolithicism. The point is not a new one, and some would argue against Ruether's suggestion that once "orthodoxy" emerged, diversity ceased to characterize Christianity. Nevertheless, this movement plays an important role in the broad picture Ruether is drawing of the shape of Christian history and the significance of this history for contemporary feminist reflection. It becomes clear toward the end of the book that Ruether sees a contemporary need to "reverse" this movement toward a monolithic orthodoxy: "[The] incorporation of many religious traditions in new syntheses ... calls European and Euroamerican Christian feminists to discover more about our repressed plurality of identities" (281).

The next section of the book traces two paradigm shifts in the understanding of gender and redemption, both of which take place within the context of the Quaker movement. The first paradigm shift involves the redefinition of women, within seventeenth-century Quaker theology, in terms of a complete original equality with men and a related condemnation of women's subordination as sinful domination. Ruether then follows the developments of the Quaker movement in late-eighteenth and nineteenth century North America in order to trace the second key paradigm shift, from an otherworldly understanding of redemption to a this-worldly understanding that mandated social activism.

These two key paradigm shifts, Ruether argues, lay "the basis for a feminist reading" of Christianity (273). The seventeenth-century Quakers, as apocalypticists, did not at first translate their theology of spiritual equality into social reform, although their own communal religious life was characterized by the active ministry of women. This shift to an emphasis on social reform occurred in the English-American millennialist sect of the Shakers (a sect of the Quakers) and the women's rights movement that arose from the abolitionist struggle of the 1840s, led to a large extent by women of Quaker background. In keeping with her general strategy of presenting history through a focus on individuals, Ruether traces the relationship between Quaker theology and political liberalism, between the abolitionist movement and the beginnings of "first-wave" feminism, through the stories and theologies of women activists such as Angelina and Sarah Grimke and Lucretia Mott. This focus on individuals enlivens Ruether's hist orical study.