image of the people who depicted him. But one thing these pictures—which reflect a spectrum of human art and imagination—have in common: they are all images of a man. If there were to be an image of a woman in that book, that one picture would stand out as the exception. However Christ is understood, as people take him up into their culture, or make of him what they will, they know him to be male. A woman is the “opposite” to Christ in a way in which someone of another race is not.35
The observation is simple and telling. Sex, says Hampson, is the great “cutting” of mankind (the Latin root means “to cut,” as in “section” and “secateurs”). It transcends cultural and racial boundaries and is deeply rooted in the facts of procreation. It is this common experience of sexual difference, located in biology and rich in cultural and literary associations, which allows the myth of Oedipus, for example, to speak to a nineteenth century bourgeois Jewish consulting-room in Vienna as well as in the furthest recesses of Hellenic history. Christian feminists often feel obliged to claim that the sex of Jesus is no more “soteriologically significant” than his Jewishness. The overwhelming evidence of human experience in every culture indicates otherwise.
This fundamental agreement between a post-Christian feminist and a catholic traditionalist—between Daphne Hampson and Austin Farrer—issues, of course, in the paradox of compulsion and expulsion. What drives her from Christianity is what he finds most compelling in it. At the same time, the common ground between them defines the task for those feminists who, for whatever reason, opt to remain in the Church. They cannot reject the miraculous and providential elements of the religion like Hampson; nor can they embrace and celebrate them, like Farrer. Instead they need somehow to demonstrate that what is providential is nevertheless inconsequential. And that is a tall order. They have attempted this in two ways. Either they have sought to minimize the significance of the “maleness” of the incarnation, or they have supposed that women’s ordination will in some way correct a current “imbalance” in religious imagery—will initiate a new “concretion,” as one might put it.
* * *
The first line of argument, seeking to minimize the “maleness” of Jesus, was starkly set out in a pamphlet published in England for the Movement for the Ordination of Women in 1990. It concluded with the sweeping statement: “that the risen and ascended Jesus has no gender.” Jesus was a boy child; but in heaven he has no sex. This ploy of locating the necessarily genderless Jesus in a cosmic Christ beyond the grave might at first seem ingenious. It even gains some support from a saying of Jesus himself about the risen life (Mark 12:25). But only a moment’s reflection is required to see that it is clear contrary to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, which hangs upon the identification between the earthly and the risen body of the Savior—a doctrine familiar to every worshipper from Wesley’s splendid Advent hymn:
Those dear tokens of his passion
Still his dazzling body bears
cause of endless exaltation
to his ransomed worshippers.
With what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars.36
What, we are entitled to ask, would a forensic pathologist make of a human body with identifiable scar tissue but no indicators of the sex of the deceased?
Dr. Susannah Cornwall, a research fellow at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, has boldly gone where no scholarship has gone before. In an article entitled “Intersex & Ontology: A Response to ‘The Church, Women Bishops and Provision,’” she is responding to a theological paper produced by the Evangelical think-tank The Latimer Trust. That Jesus was male, she claims, is “simply a best guess.” It is impossible to know “with any certainty,” she says, that Jesus did not have both male and female organs.
There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some “hidden” female physical features . . . There is simply no way of telling at this juncture whether Jesus was an unremarkably male human being, or someone with an intersex condition who had a male morphology as far as the eye could see but may or may not also have had XX chromosomes or some female internal anatomy. The fact that, as far as we know, Jesus never married, fathered children or engaged in sexual intercourse, of course, makes his “undisputable” maleness even less certain.37
But this uncertainty has, for Cornwall, some very certain consequences. It deprives the terms male and female, man and woman, of any useful content—so eliminating at a stroke the subject matter of the greater part of world literature. Nothing and no one can any more be manly or womanly. Cornwall’s claim, of course, is one which could be made, on the self-same grounds—that is, none at all—about every historical personage from Socrates to Adolf Hitler. I have not chosen these names entirely at random. Both might be thought to be a more fruitful subject for speculation than Jesus of Nazareth: with Socrates there are the accusations of corrupting youth; and with Hitler the familiar words to the tune of “Colonel Bogey.”
These rather ham-fisted attempts to geld Christianity’s Lord have probably been influenced by the American Episcopalian patristics scholar Richard A. Norris Jr. Norris, it need hardly be said, is a good deal more subtle. In a paper entitled “The Ordination of Women and the ‘Maleness’ of the Christ”38 (published in 1976, written when he was a professor at the General Theological Seminary, in the run-up to the ECUSA General Convention debate on women in the priesthood), he develops an argument from the use of metaphor in classical Trinitarian theology.
The very title of Norris’s piece is revealing in itself. The inverted commas speak volumes. Norris is clearly one who believes that sexual identity is largely, if not wholly, a social construct: that men and women are “the same thing with different fittings,” and that “humanity” in some sense subsists apart from or beyond sexual differentiation. “The Christ,” moreover, is a loaded term. It presupposes a clear divide between concept and person; between Jesus of Nazareth and “the Christ” of classical Christology. Norris wants to demonstrate that the Fathers shared the opinions of twentieth century liberal Christians about sex, and he does so by attacking, head-on, the idea that only a male can represent Christ at the altar as novel and dangerous. Like a clever undergraduate, he seeks cheekily to reverse received opinion: the present-day innovators prove to be the orthodox, and the conservatives the heretics. The notion that the Christian priesthood is male because it figures or represents a male savior, says Norris, is both modern and disturbing. “The argument is virtually unprecedented. It does not in fact state any of the traditional grounds on which ordination to presbyterate or episcopate has been denied to women. To accept the argument and its practical consequence, therefore, is not to maintain tradition, but to alter it by altering its meaning.” And he goes on to explain why. “The premises which apparently ground [the representative argument],” he claims, “. . . imply a false and dangerous understanding of the mystery of redemption—one which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would effectively deny the reality of Christ as the one in whom all things are ‘summed up.’”
All this is itself novel and unfounded. There is, as Norris must have been aware, a long tradition which speaks of the priest and bishop as representing God, Father, and Son. Ignatius of Antioch refers to the bishop as “type of the Father”;39 the iconoclast controversy of the seventh and eighth centuries debated at length whether and how, in his particularity, the Incarnate Son should be depicted and represented;40 and in the thirteenth century, Aquinas speaks
