Protestant Reflections

Woman in Christian Tradition
by George H.Tavard, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, pp. 171-186.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Turning from Orthodox and Catholic models to the Protestant contribution to a theology of womanhood, we feel a sense of disappointment. Protestantism has contributed little original insight to the problem; indeed, a recent survey of the question by a Protestant author argues that there cannot be a Protestant point of view in such a matter: the “Old Testament places us face to face with the problems that Israel discussed regarding God, and suggests no secret meanings about our nature as women.” Likewise,

the Bible, which provides us with recipes for nothing, will not give us, with a theology of woman, the excuse for a laziness which runs the danger of being satisfied with compelling myths and sacred or magic meanings, instead of a passionate and always approximate investigation. Instead of a metaphysical order to which we should conform, and of consolations that may be found in the sublimation of intolerable or false situations into parables, the Bible frees us from all archetypal forms to throw us forward into the ways of love, where one gropes for an acknowledgement of the contradictions and diversities which love assumes and reconciles. For this reason one cannot expect from a Protestant collaboration a new encyclopedic article on the biblical doctrine of woman. ... We are therefore reduced, be it with joy, to share the uncertainties and the impatient reflection of our contemporaries on woman’s becoming.(1)

Indeed, one may readily admit that while the Bible provides the freedom to use the ordinary means of investigation, it offers no solution to strictly human problems and no answer to purely natural questions. If, however, the Bible is read not only with a contemporary existential focus, but in the context of Protestant history, the answer should be more nuanced. For, whatever modern theology may think of them, there have been Protestant attempts to deal with our questions. In the following pages we will look at the insights of Luther and of Calvin and then examine some contemporary anthropologies.

What strikes me as I seek the Protestant Reformers’ insights about womanhood is that their central concern for problems of nature and grace, law and Gospel, sin and justification did not place them in a situation favorable to elaborate a theological anthropology. In the wake of late medieval theology, the thrust of their thought lay in their understanding of God’s acts in the world. But the Ockhamism by which Luther was influenced focused his thought on God’s sovereignty, which is, on the side of God, entirely good and noble, yet which often appears, on the side of man, as arbitrary and unmotivated. Thus the human condition, which is evil when considered from the point of view of man as a sinner, is nonetheless entirely just and deserved when seen from the standpoint of God’s free decision to create this kind of world, or to let sin happen in the kind of world he has made. The order of relationships between men and women are, as instances of the more general relationships within society, arbitrary but nonetheless compulsory and unavoidable. The human order, as it was to be found at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, was accepted as carrying divine sanction.

Luther’s contribution to a Christian reflection on woman is, like so many of his endeavors, full of paradoxes. His general understanding of the Gospel is meant to bring spiritual freedom to all the faithful. As images of God, men and women are equal; in the order of redemption they are equally called to justification and to life with Christ. Yet the natural order does not assign woman any other function than what corresponds to her sexual and procreative organs. Luther’s commentary on Genesis identifies mankind with Adam the male, seeing woman as adjunct to him for the sake of procreation:

Man is a more excellent creature than heaven and earth and everything that is in them. But Moses wanted to point out in a special way that the other part of humanity, the woman, was created by a unique counsel of God in order to show that this sex too is suited for the kind of life which Adam was expecting and that this sex was to be useful for procreation.(2)

Had there been no sin, woman would have been the equal of man. As things are, she is not. It is Adam who, “in his own person,” is “the most beautiful creature.” In Paradise Adam would have needed woman’s sex only to procreate. In the present life, “after our nature has become corrupted by sin, woman is needed not only to secure increase but also for companionship and for protection.” Woman “manages the household,” a good and valuable thing which frees her husband for his own pursuits. “The final cause [of the wife] is to be a mundane dwelling place to her husband.” More fundamentally, however, she must also be treated as “the medicine which she is,” namely the medicine which, through matrimony, provides a legal outlet to sexual desire, thus providing man with a remedy against sexual sins by making lawful what otherwise would be illegitimate. “We are compelled to make use of this sex in order to avoid sin.” Human beings “are compelled to make use of intercourse with their wives in order to avoid sin. As a result we are begotten and also born in sin, since our parents did not copulate because of duty but also as an antidote or to avoid sin.”(3)

Dwelling on this theme, Luther pushes to an extreme the old idea that one of the purposes of marriage is to act as a remedy for concupiscence. Yet this is not all. Marriage is not only remedial; it is also shameful now, whatever it would have been in Paradise. “Parents are compelled to hide in darkness to do this.”(4) While there is great joy in marriage, even in our corrupt nature, this joy “is contaminated by that leprous lust of the flesh which was not present in righteous Adam.” In a sense, married love is the highest love: “It burns as fire and seeks nothing more than a mate. ... All other loves seek something else than that which is love, but this love alone desires the beloved completely.”(5) Such a love, however, is no longer pure: “It is so hideous and frightful a pleasure that physicans compare it with epilepsy or falling sickness. Thus an actual disease is linked with the very activity of procreation.”(6) What happens to woman herself in this conundrum of the fallen state? Since her function is shameful, she also participates in the shame of sex. “In paradise, woman would have been a help for a duty only” (namely the duty of procreation). “But now she is also, and for the greater part at that, an antidote and a medicine; we can hardly speak of her without a feeling of shame, and surely we can not make use of her without shame.”(7) It is not surprising that Luther’s approach to our topic has been called a “genitalism.”(8) Not is it astonishing that Luther took a lenient view of polygamy, not least in the disgraceful episode of the bigamy of Philip of Hesse.(9) In polygamy, also, women are a medicine for their husbands. Their own feelings need not be taken into consideration and are never prominent in Luther’s mind, since the will of God is that women obey men. By the same token, Luther permits adultery when one of the partners cannot perform the sexual act.(10)

Given these principles, woman cannot count for much. The procreative purpose affects her entire being, which is strong for that purpose and weak in all other faculties. Furthermore, her place in the present world has been vitiated by the fall. “To me,” Luther exclaims, “it is often a source of great pleasure and wonderment to see that the entire female body was created for the purpose of nurturing children.... In procreation and in feeding and nurturing their offspring, they are masters.”(11) In everything else they are inferior and incompetent: “They cannot perform the functions of men, teach, rule, etc.” Add to this the curse brought about by the fall, and the proper functions of women are now beset with miseries:

From the beginning of that time [of conception] a woman suffers very painful headaches, dizziness, nausea, an amazing loathing of food and drink, frequent and difficult vomiting, toothache, and a stomach disorder which produces a craving, called pica, for such foods from which nature normally shrinks. Moreover, when the fetus has matured and birth is imminent, there follows the most awful distress, because only with utmost peril and almost at the cost of her life does she give birth to her offspring.(12)

All in all, woman bears the brunt of the curse, man’s share of it being reduced to the burdens of leadership: “The female sex has been greatly humbled and afflicted, and it bears a far severer and harsher punishment than the men.”(13 It seems little consolation for woman to think, as Luther advises her to do, that her punishment might well have been worse: Moreover, “Eve has been placed under the power of her husband.”

The rule remains with the husband, and the wife is compelled to obey him by God’s command. He rules the home and the state, wages war, defends his possessions, tills the soil, builds, plants, etc. The woman on the other hand is like a nail driven into the wall. She sits at home. . . . Just as the snail carries its house with it, so the wife should stay at home and look after the affairs of the household, as one who has been deprived of the ability of administering those affairs that are outside and that concern the state. She does not go beyond her most personal duties.(14)

This is the will of God. Yet women try to revolt against it, and “if they are unable to do more, they at least indicate their impatience by grumbling.”(15)

Luther, here, has used several medieval themes: the natural inferiority of woman (inherited from Aristotle), the notion of concupiscence and of marriage as an alleviation of concupiscence (one of three “goods of matrimony” of Augustine), the arbitrariness of God’s action (a theme of the Nominalist school). Set in the context of his pessimistic concept of the nature of man in his fallen state, these points build a dreadful picture of man and woman and of their mutual relationship. Redemption and justification transform the spiritual dimension of man, but without changing anything in the structure of his fallen estate. We then are faced with a paradox: sex and, accordingly, woman as defined by sex are both evil and holy. This was pithily expressed in Archbishop Cranmer’s opinion, embodied in The Bishop’s Book of 1537, that “the act of procreation between men and women” which is “of itself and of its own nature damnable,” has been, for Christians, “sanctified by the Word of God.”(16) Or, in Luther’s own words, “Therefore for the sake of Christ marriage must be holy and pure, and sexual intercourse, which in itself is most indecent, must be chaste and honorable.”(17) In the context of Luther’s concept of sin and justification, this is only one instance of the universal situation of man as sinner and yet justified. However one judges this wider context, it was not conducive, in the sixteenth century, to a well-balanced assessment of womanhood.

Calvin’s contribution to our problem is more refined than that of the spontaneous and boisterous Luther; and some evaluations of it have been extremely laudatory. In his book on “man and woman in Calvinist ethics,” André Biéler regards Calvin as a reformer of the relations between man and woman, after the darkness of the Middle Ages had brought about a complete moral decadence and at the very time that woman was starting on her progressive emancipation in modern society.(18) Yet Bieler’s elaboration on this theme shows nothing more than what could be found in a medieval conception of man and woman. Calvin’s stress lies heavily on the moral aspects of feminine behavior. This was well in line with the prevailing emphasis of Western thought, though Calvin more underscored it than was usual before him. This was partly due to the moral decadence of Renaissance mores, much more corrupt than those of the Middle Ages, and to the high ascetic ideals which Calvin proposed to, and to a great extent imposed on, the citizens of Geneva. It was also due to the fact that Protestant thought from the beginning refrained from listing marriage among the sacraments of the Gospel. The basic reasons for this are to be found in Luther’s understanding of the Gospel, which was related essentially to the promise of justification. The sacraments of the Gospel are, for him, those which directly express the promise of justification, while other ceremonies and rites of the Church which do not directly express this promise are not sacraments of the Gospel even when prevailing usage does call them sacraments.

Whatever the validity of this reasoning, it effectively removed marriage from the realm of the sacred and placed it among secular realities. Indeed, had practice followed theory, this could have entailed a sacralization or a sanctification of the secular: once all human conditions were given the status and the dignity of vocations according to the spirit of the Gospel, human activity as such could have become holy in itself. The Puritans went far in this direction. In practice, however, the ethical overstress of Calvinism and of its sequel, Puritanism, made such a sacralization of institutions hardly possible. Likewise, Pietism, which was an outgrowth of Lutheranism, stressed the ethical and subjective dimensions of man’s life. In both cases, marriage tended to become a private matter which was not the concern of the Church as such and could be abandoned to the care of secular authorities. As a natural rather than a sacramental institution, marriage came to be regulated mainly by the prevailing culture of society. The anthropology which is unavoidably implied in matrimony ceased to have a theological dimension.

There is even some irony in presenting Calvin as an emancipator of woman. We read in his Commentary on Genesis that the punishment on woman for “having trespassed over her limits” consists in “being put back in them more narrowly.” The difference between Paradise and the fallen state of man does not, as far as woman is concerned, lie between freedom and subservience, but between subservience and slavery. “She had indeed been subject to her husband, though this was an honest and by no means harsh subjection, but now she is placed as it were in slavery.”(19) Admittedly, Calvin speaks of woman with a delicacy which is alien to Luther, and he parts with the Scholastic tradition, which Luther had not done, on the important matter of the purpose of womanhood: Eve was not given to Adam only to bear his children, but to be his companion. “As if,” he objects, “she had been given to him only to sleep with him, and not to be the inseparable companion of his life.”(20) Her purpose, which she is to learn from the account of her creation, is to “help him live more comfortably.”(21) Eve is created from Adam in order to teach Adam to recognize himself in her “as in a mirror,” and to teach Eve “to be willingly subject to her husband.”(22) Indeed, “mankind, which was like a partly built edifice, has been perfected and finished in the person of the woman.” Until then, “the male was only, half the man”; once Eve had been created, Adam “saw himself complete in his wife, where he was only one half formerly.”(23) For “man was created by God to be a creature of society. Then mankind could not subsist without woman.” Through their legitimate union, “man and woman are united in one body and one soul.”(24)

Yet if Calvin teaches the companionship of man and woman, he maintains the subservience of woman to man. Woman has in truth no name, since her name “means nothing else than ”woman of man.’ ”(25) So many of the women of the Old Testament never appear because they are, as befits them, ”without a name of their own, being hidden in the shadow of their husbands.”(26) For Calvin, woman enjoys more dignity than for Luther: polygamy is “a corruption of the true and legitimate marriage,” and those who defend it today are “fanatics.”(27) Yet man, who must “show himself to be her head and leader,” may not, as Jacob did with Rachel, give her too much freedom.(28) She should be treated like a minor; and “holy heads of households should do all they can and omit nothing, in order that no spot of vice remains in their wives or their children.”(29) In the proper order of society, woman stays at home, whether she is a virgin, a wife, or a widow. This is Calvin’s commentary on the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dina:

Dina is kidnapped and raped because, having let her father’s house, she went away and wandered in greater freedom than belonged to her. She should have stayed quietly at home, as the Apostle advises it (Titus 2:5) and as nature itself teaches it, for this virtue, which a common proverb attributes to women, that they must be keepers of the house, applies to girls. For this reason the fathers are taught to keep their daughters under narrow watch if they want to protect them from all indignity. . . . One cannot doubt that Moses blames a part of the fault on Dina, when he says that she had gone out to see the girls of the area, whereas she should have stayed in the tent, within her mother’s sight.(30)

The difference between man and woman in Calvin’s eyes is also clearly brought out by his appreciation of the killing of adulteresses in Old Testament times. This was entirely proper, whether death was by stoning, as enjoined in the Law (Lev. 20:10), or by burning, as was done, he asserts, “by the common consent of all,” before the Law was formulated: “It is most certain that this was done by divine inspiration, so that the holiness of matrimony would be protected by the guidance and mastery of nature as by a very solid fence.” Calvin acknowledges that husband and wife have the same obligation of loyalty to each other. Yet he justifies the execution of the wife who has committed adultery, “whereas husbands who have fornicated with unmarried women are not subject to capital punishment.” The purpose, he asserts, “was not only to punish impudicity, but also the dishonor of the husband by his wife, and next the furtive mingling of his posterity.” The Law was actually more elaborate than this would seem to show, since, in Deuteronomy 22:22 and Exodus 16:40, capital punishment is inflicted on both the guilty wife and her male partner in sin. The sinning husband, however, went unpunished if his adultery was committed with an unmarried woman. Clearly, Calvin’s standards of judgment in this case, like those of the Law itself, betrayed an assumption of the male superiority in marriage and a corresponding assertion of male pride.

After she has heard this, it is little comfort for woman to be told that her beauty is like that of Sara, God-given, or that it is entirely proper to marry a woman for her beauty, as long as “reason is always the mistress that will contain and bring into obedience the excess and the superabundance of love.”(31) For male arrogance has provided the basic standard of discrimination between man and woman. Calvin’s understanding of the Gospel inspires him with touching exhortations to men and women alike to live in faith and holiness. Yet, for all their genuine concern for the tasks of woman as mother, these texts add nothing to what was said on the same topic before the Reformation. The purpose of this chapter is not to sketch the history of Protestant approaches to the problem of woman. Were we to do this, we would have to speak of the unorthodox speculations of Paracelsus,(32) of the aberrant views of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) on “heavenly marriage,”(33) of the interesting and important elements that can be drawn from the works of Schleiermacher (1768-1834)(34) and from the reflections of Søren Kierkegaard on woman, especially in Either/Or (1843) and in Stages on Life’s Way (1845). We would also refer to less well-known authors, like Theodor Culmann (1824- 1863), for whom the fall begins with the creation of the female sex and the division of man into a duality away from his original solipsism (Christliche Ethik, 1867). Such an investigation would result in several, and to some extent contradictory, visions of woman, in which a great deal of philosophy, anthropology, and psychology would enter.

In the twentieth century, especially since the publication in 1951 of Karl Earth’s long essay on man and woman in his Church Dogmatics, Protestant reflection on woman has aimed chiefly at recovering a strictly biblical view. Such an approach owes practically nothing to the Reformers, who turn out to be singularly unhelpful, and it differs both from “the mysticism of the Catholic woman and the modernism of her existentialist rival.”(35) Such is the avowed purpose of Charlotte von Kirschbaum’s slim volume, Die wirkliche Frau (1949):

As one will see, I have tried, in the last chapter, to keep away from the Catholic doctrine of woman (Gertrude Von Le Fort) as well as from the existentialist theories (Simone de Beauvoir). These are two ways that we cannot follow. Our problem is to seek for the bases of an evangelical doctrine of woman.(36)

Accordingly, Charlotte von Kirschbaum’s method is to comment on biblical passages, especially on the texts of Paul in Ephesians 5:21-32 and in 1 Corinthians 11 and 14. The picture which emerges shows man and woman as co-responsible before God and therefore as radically related to each other, whether it be in the common vocation of marriage or in the special charism of celibacy. Yet, within this unity of man and woman, woman remains “subordinate” to man. Far from being arbitrary, this expresses the basic order of redemption: the subordination of the Church to Christ.

On the one hand, the obedience of woman and her subordinate position must witness that Christ is the prototype of all subordination; on the other, Christ glorified, the head of all domination and authority, is at the source of the authority assigned to man. The assertion that man is the head of woman is acceptable, as long as it is not separated from its Christological context.(37)

If this is so, the subordination of woman to man makes sense because it images and announces other ordered subordinations: that of the Church to Christ and that of Christ to the Father. In spite of Charlotte von Kirschbaum’s statements to the contrary, this perspective remains close to that of Gertrude Von Le Fort: the being of woman is symbolic; its value derives from its transcendant pattern; and it calls for interpretation. It makes ultimately little difference whether the interpretation leans, like that of Gertrude Von Le Fort, toward postbiblical myths, or, like that of Charlotte von Kirschbaum, it wishes to remain strictly within biblical categories. The symbols that are invoked by the one and by the other differ in degrees, not in kind.

Charlotte von Kirschbaum was undoubtedly influenced by the theology of Karl Barth, even though Barth’s consideration of “man and woman,” in his Church Dogmatics, III/4, followed the publication of her short volume on the question. Barth made a systematic attempt to eliminate all possible myths about sex and specifically the myths that have been current in recent or contemporary thought. The myth of romanticism exalts woman to a quasi-divine level. In its Christian forms, it dominates, the thought of Schleiermacher. It is widespread in the Catholic and Orthodox searches for an “eternal feminine.” And it pervades some of the “mystical” and more or less heterodox movements within Protestantism, as in the thought of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), or outside of it, as with Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948). “We definitely reject,” Barth proclaims, “every phenomenology or typology of the sexes.”(38) Here as elsewhere, the dominant motif of Barth’s theology is to follow the Word of God in its purity as it reaches us today.

It is not unimportant that the treatment of “man and woman” in the Church Dogmatics is set in the context of a long chapter on “the command of God the Creator.” This provides the background of the question as an ethical problem: man and woman are called to follow God’s command, and to fulfill what God intends by the creation of the sexes, participation in which is inescapable for all human creatures. Each human being is man or woman; each is also called to participate in the other sex and thus to reach the fullness of his own by relationship with the counterpart which unavoidably faces him or her in the unity of what Barth calls “fellow-humanity.” Within the meaning of the Christian commitment, following God’s command is a free act which itself becomes the source of further freedom. Thus, the question answered in terms of the man-woman relationship has been asked in terms of “freedom in fellowship.” Man is called to be free. This freedom is achieved in fellowship. The typical fellowship to which man is universally called, whether he is married or not, is that which ties man and woman together.

When seen in the light of God’s call, this relationship must be, in Barth’s terms, “demythologized,” “dedemonized,” and “decentralized.” Demytholo-gizing drives away the fundamentally pagan idea, that the practice of sex opens a door into the divine, leads to a mystical realm of heavenly delights, raises man above his temporal condition. Sex must be limited to what it is, a basic human experience which implies an ethical demand. By dedemonization sex escapes the bounds of the sex organs in the strict sense. It belongs to a human being, or rather, since it is an instrument of relationships, to human beings, who must always be considered in their total personalities. “The point is that here particularly it is a question of the whole man and not merely of the use which he makes or does not make of his physical sexual organs.” Sex is “a point of transition, having its own weight and honor in the whole, but not breaking loose from the whole.”(39) There is no such thing as pan-sexuality. The whole in question (the pan of the Greek language) is man face to face with God, whether he is male or female. Decentralization means that, whereas the problem of man and woman finds its focus in marriage, it is itself broader, enveloping as it does everything that a human being does, for a human being is always a man facing woman, or a woman facing man, and he remains this even face-to-face with God. “It belongs to every human being to be male or female. It also belongs to every human being to be male and female: male in this or that distant relationship to the female, and female in a similar relationship to the male. Man is human, and therefore fellow-human, as he is male or female, male and female” (italics mine).(40)

When he asks, “What is the man in his sex, and the woman in hers?”(41) Earth rejects all typology: there is no way of knowing beforehand what maleness or femaleness may imply in the circumstances to which the Word will call and in which the divine command will be heard. Speculative attempts at defining man or woman in symbolic or metaphysical terms can do no more than canonize human preconceptions, to which the command of God is by no means bound. Admittedly, “such schemes can sometimes render us heuristic, exegetic and illustrative purposes.” They can help us to read the text, but “it is not for us to write the text at all.”(42) In other words, they can assist us in understanding ourselves and God’s design; but they are neither the design nor a blueprint of ourselves. Only one basis can provide man with security for his self-understanding and for his relationships with others and with the other sex: “That man and woman—in the relationship conditioned by this irreversible order—are the human creature of God and as such the image of God and likeness of the covenant of grace: this is the secure theological knowledge with which we ourselves work and with which we must be content.”(43) Man and woman together form God’s image. Yet they enjoy no foreknowledge of what masculinity or femininity, as called by God’s command in a concrete set of circumstances, may demand of them. “Life is richer, and above all the command of God is more manifold, than might appear from preconceived opinions.”(44)

Barth draws from this a series of consequences: each sex has always its right place, and the relationship of both sexes is always irreversible, even if what this place will be cannot appear beforehand; human beings should be content with the sex that God has given them; they should not attempt to reverse their sexual roles; they should not try to transcend the polarity of the sexes, a temptation which is particularly attractive in the ascetic traditions and which always ends up by recreating the myths of a sexless, bisexual or transsexual humanity. These attitudes are flights from the command of God. Human beings have the duty of establishing relationships with the other sex, for “in obedience to the divine command there is no such thing as a self-contained and self-sufficient male life or female life.”(45) This does not imply for all the duty to marry, but the duty to face the other sex in an attitude which Barth sums up under three heads: “They are to consider one another, to hear the question which each puts to the other, and to make responsible answer to the other."(46)

Out of this dialogue emerges an “order.” As man remains man and woman remains woman, as they become partners without becoming identical, an order appears in which man and woman are fully equal before God, free in the Gospel, yet each with a proper place in relation to the other, “in such a way that A is not B, and B is not another A but B. ... Order means succession. It means preceding and following. It means super-ordination and subordination.”(47) Thus Barth maintains a subordination of woman to man, which he considers to be implied in God’s command to them. In all humility and obedience, for he stands before God, man must be “ordered, related and directed to woman in preceding her, taking the lead as inspirer, leader and initiator in their common being and action.” Conversely, as man takes this position as a “primacy of service,” woman, knowing that she loses nothing and does not thereby become inferior, for she also stands before the Lord, must “recognize that in order she is woman, and therefore B, and therefore behind and subordinate to man.”(48)

At this point, it seems to me that Karl Barth has unwittingly reintroduced a myth: the myth of over and above, of before and after, of man the leader and woman the follower. This, of course, is justified for him by what he understands to be God’s command, as found in the Old Testament (in the myth of Genesis) and in Paul, particularly in the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Corinthians. But this is precisely the question: must the biblical witness be understood in this sense only? Can we not conceive that Christian freedom, the freedom of man with woman and of woman with man before God as coming to them in the Redeemer, has not itself been redeemed from the obligation of superiority and inferiority? In final analysis, Karl Barth has accepted an elementary form of what he has denounced in its developed forms, namely “a metaphysical order to which we should conform.” Emil Brunner’s approach to the question of womanhood is disconcerting, beset with paradoxes or contradictions. In The Divine Imperative, originally published in German in 1932, Brunner insists on a point that he will maintain in his later writings: “Woman is not only physically different from man, she is also different in soul and spirit.... It is certain that the Creator who has created body and soul as a unity, has also created the mental and spiritual nature of woman different from that of man.”(49) This was Thomas Aquinas’s contention, based on Aristotelian hylomorphism. Brunner does not base it on technical philosophy, however, but on what he takes to be the fundamental purpose and rule of woman’s being, as perceived by common sense, namely procreation: “So long as it is only women and not men who bear children and nurse them, so long also also the domain of woman will be essentially different from that of man.”(50) In other words, it is from the physiology of woman that one may judge her mind and her soul. This is maintained in Man in Revolt (1937): Sex affects not only the body and the physiological functions but also the “psychical and spiritual being” of man and woman.(51) Accordingly, the difference between them is a “difference in kind,”(52) affecting the whole person, soul and body.

In spite of this, Brunner insists, against Karl Barth, that each human being is, in himself, the imago Dei, regardless of sex. “It is going too far to assert that the male and female existence of humanity is identified with the imago Dei.” What must be asserted is that “sex belongs, not only to the nature which has been created by God, but also to the imago Dei,”(53) a very peculiar doctrine, since it would imply that the human nature as created by God is not itself the image of God, and that the imago is an additional perfection. This obscurity affects Brunner’s anthropology deeply, which wavers between a biblical, an Aristotelian, and a Platonic concept of the soul. The body is an instrument for the soul. In an Aristotelian psychology the soul is essentially linked to her body, whereas a Platonic psychology sees the soul as an entity in and by itself, which happens to operate, in this life, through a body. The Dogmatics describes the body as “the means of expression and the instrument of the spirit and the will. . . . [it] is full of the symbolism of [man’s] divine-human destiny, and is admirably suited for its realization.”(54) By contrast, “the spirit... is that aspect of human nature by means of which man can perceive his divine destiny and, knowing and recognizing this, can receive it, and transmit it to the body, as the instrument through which it is accomplished.”(55) Here Brunner speaks in terms of a twofold anthropology. At other times he refers to a threefold anthropology, spirit (or imago Dei), soul (or psyche), and body. Thus, we read in Man in Revolt: “The differentiation of the biological sexual function in the man and the woman has its exact counterpart in the mental and spiritual nature of both sexes, although ... it recedes in exact proportion to the measure in which the spirit, and the personal spirit in particular, becomes strong.”(56) Accordingly, man and woman are body (biology, where sex reigns), mind and spirit (psychology, where sex reigns, as this is the counterpart of the first element), spirit (where the influence of sex recedes as the spirit waxes stronger). This hesitancy between several anthropologies illustrates the difficulty of accounting for antithetic notions at the same time: the belief that the image of God applies equally to man and woman in themselves rather than in their mutual relationship does not tally with the idea that man and woman differ “in kind,” in “nature,” and therefore in the totality of their body and soul.

This basic inconsistency leads to others. Emil Brunner makes woman a special kind of human being, whom he describes in relation to the body, even when the adverb “spiritually” is used:

... it may be said that also spiritually the man expresses the productive principle and the woman expresses the principle of bearing, tending and nourishing. The man turns more to the outside world, the woman turns more to the inner realm; the man inclines to be objective, the woman to be subjective; the man seeks the new, the woman preserves the old; the man roams about, the woman makes a home.(57)

Pointing out the excesses to which woman is prone, Brunner continues:

For her the relation between husband and wife is far more central than it is for her husband; in this she loses her universal destiny, her spiritual task, she allows herself to be persuaded by her husband that she belongs to the home and has no other responsibilities outside. She lays far more emphasis upon the fact of sex, she is far more sexual than the man, although the instinct within her, from the purely organic point of view, is not so acute and passionate. If the husband is falsely free, she is falsely bound; and if the husband is impersonal and intellectual, she tends to be personal and natural in a wrong way.(58)

This sort of psychological description has been taken for granted by men for centuries. Karl Barth rightly protests that there is no warrant for it in Christian Revelation. Brunner himself admits that “such a theory of sex is of course, like all such theories, to be accepted with all due reserve.” Yet he makes it the cornerstone of his own understanding of woman, for he takes it as normative of what, in keeping with the divine imperative, woman should be: the “sexual disposition . . . helps to determine the whole psychical and even the spiritual nature of the man and the woman. Just as the whole physical nature of man is connected with and indeed penetrated by the organic sex function, so also is his psychical and spiritual being.”(59)

In this case, one fails to understand why sex should disappear in the next world. Yet this is Brunner’s belief. “The sex element belongs to the sphere of earth, not to that of heaven, to the temporal, not to the eternal.”(60) “The sexual quality and function of man is full of the symbolism of true community. The love between the sexes, the love of man and woman, is the earthenware vessel in which true love, agape, is to be contained; it can therefore be thrown away when the course in the preparatory school has achieved its end.”(61) One may well ask what happens then to the spirit of man and woman, penetrated as they are, in Brunner’s view, with sexuality. Anthropology and eschatology are at odds at this point.

Another inconsistency affects Brunner’s description of the relationship of sex and spirit. This relationship is inescapable, since spirit is affected by the basic function of sex. Woman is motherly in all her being because she is destined to be a mother physically. Likewise, male aggressiveness dominates man’s social and spiritual endeavors, because the male functions as the initiator in sexual relationships. Brunner’s doctrine of original sin, however, introduces a dichotomy between these interpenetrating elements of human nature:

Sin has entered into the sex relation in such a way that the sex nature and the personal life, sexuality and spiritual destiny, the sex creature and the spiritual creature have become separated. Shame is the expression of this separation, surprise at the fact that man is both the one and the other. Man now feels, and rightly, that the personal-spiritual element and the sexuality which he now has are incompatible, and thus he feels that from the point of view of personal existence sex does not belong to him; it is low, and base, humiliating, animal nature.(62)

This is, of course, dependent on a very profound notion of sin as a radical self-alienation of fallen man: sin penetrates as far as the connection in man between the physical and the spiritual. But there seems to be no corresponding description of overcoming this estrangement through grace, of the incomparable newness that the Christian reality has introduced into human self-understanding and into human relationships, of the freedom to which the faithful are called in Christ Jesus. Thus, in some passages, Brunner expresses some sympathy with the theories, which however he does not fully endorse, which identify man with the luminous, heavenly aspect of reality, and woman with the chtonic, infernal, demonic, dark aspect. Man is Apollonian and woman Dionysiac. Admittedly, Brunner clearly condemns this typology as incompatible with the biblical statement, “Male and female he created them.” He objects that such a mythology deals with abstractions, and not with persons.(63) The struggle between “Apollo and the chtonic deities” does oppose man and woman; but it takes place within each of them in the form of a combat “between the brightness of the spirit and the darkness of passion,” between “spirit and nature,” between “spirit and sex.”(64) In Brunner’s anthropology, however, this struggle results in the profound feeling of shame which takes hold of man and woman at the very thought of nakedness and sexuality. At this point, it seems to me that Brunner does not describe a universal experience. The shame in question may well be a product of “civilization” rather than a requirement of the human condition. Were he to be logical in holding such shame as normative, he ought to add that men and women should be ashamed of each other no less than of themselves; and that the male should be particularly ashamed of the female who attracts him away from the spirit toward the divinities of the earth to which she is germane.

It seems ironical that Karl Barth, who explicitly rejects the sort of typology of womanhood that Brunner accepts without trusting it completely, should be quite assertive about the “order” in which men and women stand in relation to one another. Brunner seems more hesitant. At least in The Divine Imperative he concludes, though somewhat against his own arguments, that “a true marriage is only possible where the wife is in every way equal to the husband in independence and responsibility.”(65) Man in Revolt paints a different picture. Physiological typology is taken as normative, as shown by the transition from “is” to “must” in the following text:

The man is the one who produces, he is the leader; the woman is receptive, and she preserves life; it is the man’s duty to shape the new; it is the woman’s duty to unite it and adapt it to that which already exists. The man has to go forth and make the earth subject to him, the woman looks within and guards the hidden unity. The man must be objective and generalize, the woman must be subjective and individualize; the man must build, the woman adorns; the man must conquer, the woman must tend; the man must comprehend with all his mind, the woman must impregnate all with the life of her soul. It is the duty of the man to plan and to master, of the woman to understand and to unite.(66)

Brunner logically adds, “In these distinctive qualities there lies a certain super-and sub-ordination.”(67) Thus we are back in the myth of man the leader and woman the obedient follower.

In these instances, the Protestant tradition has not proposed a theological model for womanhood. At its worst, it has repeated cliche’s that have no special theological relevance, at times giving them theological sanction. At its best, it has tried to discover a strictly biblical anthropology. It has preserved ideas coming from the older Catholic tradition, especially in its medieval form, and it has borrowed notions from contemporary secular research, chiefly psychological and phenomenological. Given the Reformation emphasis on the pure Gospel, one may wonder if a strictly Protestant theological anthropology is possible and therefore if a Protestant doctrine of womanhood may be formulated. This need not be a disparaging remark. Indeed, it coincides with the contention of Françoise Florentin-Smyth in her essay quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Karl Barth has made the most thorough attempt to detail a theology of womanhood. The result is a very biblically inspired reflection which contains valuable insights on the interrelationship of man and woman and on their being interrelatedly the image of God. Emil Brunner has proposed what is to me a very pessimistic view of sex and of mankind in general, one most unlikely to inspire anyone with much devotion to the task of being a man or a woman...

One will have noticed that all the authors mentioned have steered clear from any consideration of models properly so called: neither Mary, nor the Holy Spirit, nor the divine Sophia have been called upon to tell us what woman is. This is in keeping with the common Protestant stance on Mariology, although there is no reason why Protestantism should avoid a reflection on the Spirit, if such a reflection can bring some light to bear on our topic. The basic concern to remain close to Scripture and to avoid theological elaborations that tend in a myth creating direction may still explain the absence of Pneumatological considerations at this point.

It would seem that with the outmoded anthropology of the Reformers, with the passing of the predominant influence of Karl Barth, with the unpopularity of the neo-Calvinism of Emil Brunner, and with the corresponding rise of phenomenologically oriented theologies, the Protestant woman is left to the perspective opened before her by Françoise Florentin-Smyth: to share with joy “the uncertainties and the impatient reflection of our contemporaries.

Notes

1. Françoise Florentin-Smyth, “La femme en milieu protestant,” in Tatiana Struve, Agnès Cunningham, Françoise Florentin-Smyth, La Femme (Paris, 1968), pp. 141, 150. There is an extensive Protestant literature on woman, but most of it is not primarily theological. See Henry Wheeler, Deaconesses Ancient and Modern (New York, 1889); Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family (Boston, 1944); Kathleen Bliss, The Service and Status of Women in the Churches (London, 1952); Margaret Brackenbury Crook, Women and Religion (Boston, 1964); Francine Dumas, Man and Woman: Similarity and Difference (Geneva, 1966); Elsie Thomas Culver; Woman in the World of Religion (New York, 1967); Margaret Sittler Ermarth, Adam’s Fractured Rib (Philadelphia, 1970); Georgia Harkness, Women in Church and Society: A Historical and Theological Inquiry (Nashville-New York, 1972).

2. Lectures on Genesis, in Jaroslav Pelikan, ed., Luther’s Works, I (St. Louis, 1958), p. 115. Luther’s Lectures on Genesis were written in 1535-1536.

3. Ibid., p. 116.

4. Ibid., p. 117.

5. Quoted in Roland Bainton, What Christianity Says about Sex, Love and Marriage (New York, 1957), p. 76.

6. Lectures on Genesis (Luther’s Works, I, p. 119).

7. Ibid., pp. 118-119.

8. Olavi Lahteenmaki, Sexus und Ehe bei Luther (Turku, Finland, 1955), p. 64.

9. Ibid., pp. 86-92.

10. De captivitate babylonica (Works of Martin Luther, II [Philadelphia, 1943], pp. 269-270). See also Lahteenmaki, pp. 73-74.

11. Lectures on Genesis (Luther’s Works, I, pp. 202-203).

12. Ibid., p. 200.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., pp. 202-203.

15. Ibid.

16. The Bishops’ Book, or the Institution of a Christian Man, 1537 (C. Lloyd, Formularies of Faith put forth by Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII [Oxford, 1856], p. 89).

17. Lectures on Genesis (Luther’s Works, IV [St. Louis, 1964], p. 233). The Latin text seems stronger than the English translation: “Ideoque conjugium propter Christum sanctum et purum, concubitum pudicum et honestum esse necesse est, qui per se est foedissimus” (Martin Luthers Werke, 43 [Weimar, 1912], p. 302).

18. Andre Bieler, L’Homme et le femme dans la morale calviniste (Geneva, 1963).

19. Commentaire sur la Genèse (Commentaires de Jean Calvin sur l’Ancien Testament, I [Geneva, 1961], p. 83).

20. Ibid., p. 57.

21. Ibid., p. 56.

22. Ibid., p. 58.

23. Ibid., p. 59.

24. Ibid., p. 55.

25. Ibid., p. 60.

26. Ibid., p. 441.

27. Ibid., pp. 61, 462.

28. Ibid., pp. 57, 456.

29. Ibid., p. 456.

30. Ibid., p. 486.

31. Ibid., p. 530.

32. See above, chap. 7, n.20.

33. Marriage and the Sexes in Both Worlds (The Swedenborg Library, IX [Philadelphia, 1875]).

34. “Wherever I look, it always seems to me that the nature of women is nobler and their life happier, and if ever I toy with an impossible wish, it is to be a woman” (quoted in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4 [Edinburgh, 1961], p. 155).

35. Odette Grosjean-Darier, in the foreword to the French version of Charlotte von Kirschbaum, Die wirkliche Frau (Zurich, 1949): Découverte de la Femme (Geneva, 1951).

36. Charlotte von Kirschbaum, Preface to the German edition, Découverte de la Femme, p. 8.

37. Ibid., p. 64.

38. Karl Barth, III/4, p. 152. This section of the Church Dogmatics has also been printed separately as Mann und Frau (Munich, 1964).

39. Ibid., pp. 130-131.

40. Ibid., p. 140.

41. Ibid., p. 150.

42. Ibid., p. 151.

43. Ibid., pp. 151-152.

44. Ibid., p. 154.

45. Ibid., p. 163.

46. Ibid., p. 167.

47. Ibid., p. 169.

48. Ibid., pp. 170-171.

49. Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative (London, 1937), pp. 374-375.

50. Ibid., p. 375.

51. Man in Revolt (New York, 1939), p. 347.

52. Ibid., pp. 357-358.

53. Dogmatics II (Philadelphia, 1949), p. 63.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., pp. 62-63

56. Man in Revolt, pp. 352-353.

57. Ibid., p. 354.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., p. 347.

60. Ibid., p. 361.

61. Dogmatics, II, p. 65.

62. Man in Revolt, pp. 350-351.

63. Ibid., p. 356.

64. Ibid., p. 352.

65. The Divine Imperative, p. 379.

66. Man in Revolt, pp. 358-359.

67. Ibid.

68. See above, n. 1. This chapter does not include a study of D. S. Bailey’s The Man-Woman Relation in Christian Thought (London, 1959) or of Helmut Thielicke’s The Ethics of Sex (New York, 1964), for their topics, although related to mine, are not mine. Likewise, I need not examine at this point the literature dealing with the ordination of women, much of which is more anthropological than theological. To appreciate the nontheological nature of a large part of the discussion about ordination of women, see Elsie Thomas Culver, pp. 325-326.

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