re-imagining of our language about God,” of which Rowan Williams spoke, turns out to require the elimination of every last vestige of Christian doctrine. Incarnation, Atonement, Final Judgement, Hell and Heaven: all must go.
* * *
Strangely but predictably, there is much in common between Hampson’s radical post-Christian position and that of traditionalist opponents of women’s ordination. She rejects Christianity and they reject feminism, for the same reasons. Where Hampson parts company with her forebears in the radical Enlightenment is in her understanding of what she calls “concretion”: the embodiment of the essential ideas of the religion in lively and compelling images. Enlightenment thinkers were generally disposed to a reductionist view of religion. For them it was merely extravagant language about something else—something which could be simply stated and independently arrived at by rational argument. Spinoza, for example, seems to have held that the sum total of the teachings of Judaism and Christianity amounted to the rabbinical charge to love God and neighbor. The rest—the election of the Jews, the divinity of Christ—was mere persiflage. “Religion stands in no need of the trappings of superstition. On the contrary its glory is diminished when it is embellished with such fancies.” Thomas Jefferson famously encouraged Joseph Priestley to compile an edition of the gospels which excised the miracles and omitted the resurrection; and when Priestley reneged on the project, he did it himself. “I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”29
Hampson differs. She sees that kerygma cannot so readily be separated from mythos. And rather surprisingly, she quotes C. S. Lewis approvingly to that effect:
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in Heaven” . . . Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. . . . But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable. . . . A child who had been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child.30
Hampson goes on to quote Austin Farrer, for whom the images are given in the same way.
“As for the terms in which St. Paul expressed it—well, there you are—he used any sort of figure that came to hand: he picked up a rhetorical metaphor from a cynic preaching in the market. . . . He would have been amazed to learn that subsequent generations would make such stuff the foundation of dogmas. We should strip off the fashions of speech; but keep the substance, of course.” . . . But what is the substance? It has an uncanny trick of evaporating once its accidents of expression are all removed. Now the thought of Christ Himself was expressed in certain dominant images. . . . These tremendous images . . . are not the whole of Christ’s teaching, but they set forth the supernatural mystery which is the heart of the teaching. . . . It is because the spiritual instruction is related to the great images, that it becomes revealed truth. . . . We have to listen to the Spirit speaking divine things: and the way to appreciate his speech is to quicken our own minds with the life of the inspired images. . . . Theology is the analysis and criticism of the revealed images. . . . Theology tests and determines the sense of the images, it does not create it. The images, of themselves, signify and reveal.31
Those familiar with his work will know that Farrer expands the same point, with characteristic depth of perception, in his English appreciation of Bultmann.
There are certain steps in demythicization which, being the elimination of puerile error, can be got through once for all and not repeated, but there is another sort of demythicization which never ends in this life because it belongs to the very form of our religious thought. When we pray, we must begin by conceiving God in full and vigorous images, but we must go on to acknowledge the inadequacy of them and to adhere nakedly to the imageless truth of God. The crucifixion of the images in which God is first shown to us is a necessity of prayer because it is a necessity of life. The promise of God’s dealing with us through grace can be set before us in nothing but images, for we have not yet experienced the reality. When we proceed to live the promises out, the images are crucified by the reality, slowly and progressively, never completely, and not always without pain: yet the reality is better than the images. Jesus Christ clothed himself in all the images of messianic promise, and in living them out, crucified them: but the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy. This is very God and life eternal, whereby the children of God are delivered from idols.32
For Farrer, as for Hampson, what is conveyed is certainly not identical with, but nevertheless is clearly shaped by, the concretion. Christ, fulfilling the archetypal images, is both King and Victim. But he is not less a king because he is a victim; for the Cross is the consummation of his reign. “Concretion,” Farrer is saying, is effected, not merely by employing the images; but by living and fulfilling them. Which is precisely what Jesus did and the Christian is called to do. It is the tragedy of the arguments in favor of women’s ordination that they have sloganized Galatians 3:28 and paid so little attention to the fifth chapter of the letter to the Ephesians. There, Paul portrays the marital bond as an acted parable of the divine love—of Christ’s love for the Church. Only when the imagery is put into action is its truth experienced and known. The existential reality is both sweeter and more bitter than the images of prophecy.
A similar idea is developed in Inter Insigniores, the declaration of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the question of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood, which was approved by Pope Paul VI on October 15, 1976 (less than a month after the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate).
[The incarnation] cannot be disassociated from the economy of salvation; it is, indeed, in harmony with the entirety of God’s plan . . . For the salvation offered by God to men and women . . . took on, from the Old Testament Prophets onwards, the privileged form of a nuptial mystery: for God the Chosen People is seen as his ardently loved spouse. . . . Christ is the Bridegroom; the Church is his bride, whom he loves because he has gained her by his blood.33
And traditionalists have made a related point by reminding exegetes that scripture is, to a large extent, narrative. It is itself a parable. That the principal protagonists in the tale are male cannot be said to be insignificant. Different protagonists, after all, would mean a different story.
The matter can be put succinctly: is it remotely imaginable that the foundational “story” of Christian tradition could revolve around a female savior, crucified on Calvary? Surely, whatever might be involved in such an event, it would be something quite different from the death of Jesus Christ. His sacrificial death not only fulfills the scriptural pattern (looking back to Joseph, to Isaac and, reaching back even beyond the inauguration of the covenant with Abraham, to Abel), it also resonates with human instinct and human experience in general.34
Hampson agrees:
Consider then the following. A book, edited by Hans-Ruedi Weber (until recently of the World Council of Churches), On a Friday Noon, shows illustrations of Christ crucified, drawn from all cultures and times in history. The variety
