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
