Orthodoxy and Gender

First released in late 2019, this book is now published this summer in a more affordable paperback edition. It treats what is arguably one of, if not the most, neuralgic areas in contemporary Christian debates: Orthodox Christianity and Gender, eds. Helena Kupari and Elina Vuola (Routledge, 2021), 224pp. 

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

The Orthodox Christian tradition has all too often been sidelined in conversations around contemporary religion. Despite being distinct from Protestantism and Catholicism in both theology and practice, it remains an underused setting for academic inquiry into current lived religious practice. This collection, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance by investigating modern manifestations of Orthodox Christianity through an explicitly gender-sensitive gaze. By addressing attitudes to gender in this context, it fills major gaps in the literature on both religion and gender.

Starting with the traditional teachings and discourses around gender in the Orthodox Church, the book moves on to demonstrate the diversity of responses to those narratives that can be found among Orthodox populations in Europe and North America. Using case studies from several countries, with both large and small Orthodox populations, contributors use an interdisciplinary approach to address how gender and religion interact in contexts such as, iconography, conversion, social activism and ecumenical relations, among others.

From Greece and Russia to Finland and the USA, this volume sheds new light on the myriad ways in which gender is manifested, performed, and engaged within contemporary Orthodoxy. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that employing the analytical lens of gender enables new insights into Orthodox Christianity as a lived tradition. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of both Religious Studies and Gender Studies.

God, Sex, and the Desiring Self's Repetitive Liturgics

The recent news that the venerable Norris-Hulse professorship of divinity in the University of Cambridge is passing from Sarah Coakley to Catherine Pickstock is as good an occasion as any to draw attention to some of the works of both of these extraordinarily luminous women, and to record some longer and long-overdue thoughts about Coakley's God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity' (Cambridge UP, 2013).

In 1997 Pickstock's doctoral dissertation was published as After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It rightly attracted a good deal of attention, both for its own rather stunning argumentation but also because its author was involved with John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy crowd, even to the point of the two of them editing a book Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. I devoured both books within weeks of publication, and contacted both Pickstock and Milbank (during his brief stint at the University of Virginia) about doctoral work with them.

That RO movement attracts far less attention today than it did twenty, and even ten, years ago. But Pickstock's After Writing nonetheless was, and remains, the most far-reaching and intellectually sophisticated critical analysis of the problems of liturgical reform at and after Vatican II. I have always maintained that her central point, about the abolition of structural repetition (treated also in a different fashion in a later book: Repetition and Identity) based on a suspect modern notion of linear time is the most damning criticism made against the reforms in the Latin Church which influenced, in turn, similar reforms in Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and elsewhere. I have yet to see anyone address this criticism in any serious way. To my mind this attempt at abolishing repetition is the greatest weakness of Western liturgics, as I argued at length elsewhere more than fifteen years ago now.

Let me turn now to Coakley, who did me the honour last July of being respondent to my paper at a conference at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota on reception history. She was as gracious an interlocutor as she is learned and it was a delight to converse with her.

This book of hers, God, Sexuality, and the Self, is the first of a projected four-volume systematics. Eastern Christians who might at this point be getting ready to pounce with objections to this method ("systematics" is not Eastern!) or to its author (she's Anglican! and she claims to be a priest!! who's influenced by feminism!!!) need to sit down and be quiet. She's grappling with questions that the Orthodox and Catholic Churches are grappling with in the same cultural context. And she's doing so in a way and via a method perfectly orthodox: by looking to see what the Fathers especially have to say, and how they can point us forward beyond the impasse of capitulating to the culture on all matters sexual, on the one hand, or merely repeating traditionalist slogans on the other while hoping these questions somehow go away.

She lays out in the introduction some of her major interlocutors: of the ancients, Plato, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Augustine, and Ps-Dionysius (about whom see this co-edited work of Coakley); of the moderns, she begins with Freud and the question of desire, arguing that "desire is more fundamental than 'sex'" (10). For God (unlike for us), desire indicates no lack, but instead is the "longing love" God has for His creation to flourish in the fullness of life within the Godhead. It is this treatment of desire that is, to my mind, the most central and compelling part of her book.


At the outset Coakley is positioning herself by noting that desire for God is ultimately what is missing in contemporary "secular" discussions about sexual desire, sexual orientation, and sexual differentiation ("gender"). What Christianity, especially that informed by both Platonic and patristic sources, brings to the discussion, as she has argued in another book, is an emphasis on asceticism which, together with prayer "too deep for words" allows us to purify that desire and to be purified of any illusions we may have about God. Indeed, this focus on prayer is a central and distinctive feature of Coakley's work as she pushes back, rightly, against the tendency to treat theology purely as an intellectual endeavor: "theology in its proper sense is always in via as practitional" (45).

This emphasis on practice is not a means of escape either from hard metaphysical thinking, or the perhaps even harder task of working against injustice in the world. It is only in prayer and especially silence that we can hear the voices of those who are suffering and are marginalized--voices which, Coakley says, are often drowned out by our own high-minded calls to alleviate that suffering without first allowing the sufferers themselves to speak in their own terms.

As she continues to circle closer into her focus on desire, Coakley argues that "desire is also more fundamental than gender, and that the key to the secular riddle of gender can lie only in its connection to the doctrine of the trinitarian God" (52), a point I am very glad to hear someone else making. I attempted to make it several years ago in debates about same-sex relations in a theological context, saying that ultimately arguments from "authority" or "tradition" cut very little ice today even with people inside the Church; the only serious argument must centre on the nature of the triune God.

Coakley here introduces--with promise of more to come--her very sensitive and careful discussion of the 'threeness' of God and the 'twoness' of human gender, saying that hers "is a theory about gender's mysterious and plastic openness to divine transfiguration" (58). All the Christians currently freaking out about "transgenderism" would do well to think on Coakley for a while and the tradition she draws on. Any time you posit that the human person, divided into male and female, is created in the image of the undivided and sexless Trinity you are going to have very serious and difficult questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation vis-à-vis the Trinity.

Questions of transgenderism and sexuality invite contributions from sociology, psychology, gender studies, and other fields, and Coakley's book is especially helpful in laying out nine guidelines (pp.88-92) for such conversations as part of her project of théologie totale. The graciousness with which she engages these questions, and the honesty of her work, comes throughout the book, and is summed up again at the very end, where she notes that "the contemplative is the one who is forced to acknowledge the 'messy entanglement' of sexual desire and the desire for God" (340). Contemplation, with asceticism, also re-orders the passions, changes and purifies our desire for God, offers a safeguard against illusions and idols: "the hermeneutics of suspicion never comes to an end" (343). 

For these and many other insights in this densely argued, but carefully and clearly written, work, let all the people say: Deo gratias. And let us keep watch for the next volumes in her work.

On Political and Sexual Epistemological Crises

I have several times previously drawn attention to Adam Phillips, the English literary scholar and psychoanalyst, certainly the most prolific and quite likely also the most interesting analytic writer today. There is, I have suggested, a clear "apophatic" theme and impulse in much of his writing, and that is perhaps nowhere so clear as in one of his early, short books I have just finished: Terrors and Experts (Harvard University Press, 1997), 128pp. I hope to develop this apophatic connection in more detail elsewhere, showing how much in Phillips is very sympathetic to, and thus useful for dialogue with, Eastern Christian spirituality.

It is sometimes a cheap trick to claim that a book or an idea from decades or centuries ago is directly "relevant" in light of the headlines of today. But I would suggest that this book is not so much relevant now as superfluous, but in a good way, that is, as having fulfilled its purpose, albeit belatedly: the very thing it calls for is now to be found in abundance. Thus, with ongoing eruptions of "fake news," the uses and abuses of propaganda of all sorts--whether from Russia, ISIS, or others--and the widespread scorn for, and collapse of the authority of, "experts" (whether in politics, the media, Church, climate change science, and elsewhere), we seem more than ever to live in an age where "experts" are treated with skepticism at best, and scorn at worst.

This is precisely the sort of thing Phillips would seem to encourage: "psychoanalysis...radically revises our versions of competence." Here, as in his many other books, he sees the usefulness of psychoanalysis precisely insofar as it undermines unhealthy (neurotic) certainties and loosens things up, allowing people new thoughts and new freedom, including the freedom to forget about themselves. To the extent that psychoanalysis itself becomes an ideology enforcing various lines of authority and various forms of orthodoxy, it has, Phillips says, lost its usefulness and deserves to be ignored: "Psychoanalysts run the risk of believing that there is a King's English of the psyche and everybody is, or should be, speaking it." Psychoanalysis is, rather, at its best when it ranges itself "against the enemies of ambiguity" and gives free reign to its capacity "to both comfort and unsettle."

We have recently seen several attempts at understanding Western politics and politicians via psychoanalytic categories, including this very interesting article, as well as regular, and by now tedious, discussions of Donald Trump's "vulgarity" and his "id." Regardless of what one thinks of all this, Phillips argues that once one accepts the reality of an unconscious mind, all attempts at certainty and "dignity," at acting authoritatively or expertly or "presidentially," at speaking unequivocally, are perpetually undermined: "the unconscious, at least as Freud described it, is another word for the death of the guru." A guru claims to offer us a solution to a problem he has himself largely invented, and further claims there is only one solution, his, which will solve the problem. But the unconscious, Phillips reminds us by quoting Freud's The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest, "'speaks more than one dialect'." It is an unruly cacophony, and it mocks all gurus and bourgeois mandarins and prissy etiquette experts with their notions of what constitutes "appropriate tone" or "appearing presidential" rather than "vulgar."

Radically unsettling and undermining notions of competence, expertise, and authority are not things that most of us encourage others to do: "politicians in Western democracies do not get elected on the basis of their capacity for hesitation, or their willingness to sustain contradictory points of view, or their ability to change their minds, or their impassioned support for the opposition's point of view," Phillips notes. That is greatly to be pitied, for as Alasdair MacIntyre has often noted, the greatest need today is precisely the ability radically to put to the question all the claims of Western politicians on behalf of the structures of neoliberal capitalism, which too often largely remain hidden from us, offering us only a chimera of choice between alternatives that are, on closer examination, the same: conservative liberalism, liberal liberalism, or radical liberalism.

In such a context, the role of both a moral philosopher such as MacIntyre and an analyst such as Phillips (who both come out of the British left, and know each other's work) is to become, ironically, an "expert on the truths of uncertainty" and to resist the tendency, much in evidence in this country since 9/11, to defer to "experts" in the name of what I think has become the most pernicious American idol today, viz., "security." For part of the problem here is that, at least sometimes, "the expert constructs the terror, and then the terror makes the expert."

If Phillips, here and in other books (especially his Unforbidden Pleasures:Rethinking Authority, Power, and Vitality, which I reviewed here) offers much that is useful to undermining contemporary politicians and politics, with their bogus claims to certainty and authority, then in the latter parts of Terrors and Experts he offers much to put to the question the politics and ideologies of sexuality, not least in the grotesques of "gender ideology." Too much of what passes for discussion of these issues today is a cheap amalgam of essentialism, romanticism, and nostalgia; too much nonsense is spread about by those unwilling to recognize the legitimate differences between culturally conditioned and contingent gender roles on the one hand, and the sexual differentiation given by the Creator on the other. Here there is plenty of fault to go round: those demanding that nobody be permitted to deviate from preferred pronouns and nomenclature, and those resisting that with equal hostility and certainty. When it comes to sex and gender, most people, it seems, are, as Phillips might put it, themselves both terrors and experts! In a slightly different idiom, found in his book On Balance, when it comes to things we are most passionate about, including our sexual identities, we become unbalanced and instead emerge as intolerant fanatics.

As I have argued elsewhere, Catholic and Orthodox Christians are guilty of making the tradition say what it has not, of pulling the fabric too far to patch holes of their own making, when they attempt to argue that, from the premise "God created us male and female," certain prescriptive conclusions for how men and women are to act and think must inexorably follow. (It's the same slippery and over-hasty procedure used by those who assume that from a few vague buzzwords in Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I, the pope can do whatever he wants in any and all matters. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays.)

This is not to cast doubt on historic Christian teaching about sexual morality, which I support, but only to suggest that much of the contemporary theological debate on these issues is often unconsciously bound up with many other issues, especially those of social class, economic standing, and cultural conditioning, almost all of which go unrecognized. Moreover, it pretends to a certainty that I think few of us have, and then it attempts to enforce that certainty on others. From the Creator's "is" we are over-hasty in trying to draw our own "oughts." What and whom does that really serve well?

Instead of racing to unsustainable and intellectually vacuous "answers" about sexual differentiation, we need to be much more careful here about getting some of the questions right. My friend the Orthodox biblical scholar Edith Humphrey, whom I look forward to seeing next week at a conference in Minnesota, has recently done some of that here in a piece I commend to your attention.

Phillips will be radically unsettling to those who like their sexual roles and regulations highly detailed and prescriptive. Good luck with that. As he repeatedly notes, "there is nothing like sexuality...for making a mockery of our self-knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do not always accord with our standards." Moreover, Phillips rescues Freud's original insight into human bisexuality, and reintroduces Ferenczi's idea of "ambisexuality."

The result of all this is to note that "from a psychoanalytic point of view, nobody can know about sexuality" in part because "we are never one thing or another, but a miscellany. (For how long in any given day is one homosexual or heterosexual, and can you always tell the difference?)" We seek to be one thing and never another, and certainly Christians try to prescribe this, but that, at the very least, is, Phillips suggests, merely an expression of our "wish to be defined [which] is complicit with the wish to be controlled."

Rather than always and everywhere seeking control and certainty, seeking refuge from the terrors of the world and of love (including God's love, perhaps the most terrifying of all, though Phillips does not suggest this) in the shadow of the expert, the healthy mind is one that is free to forget, free not to focus on itself, free to avoid making a "fetish of memory," and free to kick out its own resident "enraged bureaucrat" who is always trying to organize, structure, and control thoughts. In the end, Phillips says that psychoanalysis, theology, politics, and anything else has to resist the descent into what he calls "Cartesianism," that is, into highly and tightly structured systems of thought in which we think we have thought everything there is to be thought, and no new or free thoughts are to be had. Psychoanalysis, like Christianity, works best when it reminds us that "too much definition leaves too much out."

The Mind of Christ and a Psychoanalytic Mind (VI)

I recently received the following book from the editor of Reviews in Religion and Theology, for which I am a regular reviewer. I shall not be able to reproduce my review here, but once I have read it, I will nonetheless share some other thoughts on a book that fits in with our on-going series here on the relationship between Christianity and psychoanalytic thought: Nathan Carlan and Donald Capps, The Gift of Sublimation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Multiple Masculinities (Cascade, 2015), 212pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

There is not, and never was, a monolithic masculinity; there are, and always have been, multiple masculinities. Today diversity with regard to gender and sexuality is beginning to be recognized and celebrated even while many religious denominations still resist these cultural changes. This book offers pastoral interpretations of these social shifts in light of psychological principles, applying them to topics such as the moral disapproval of masturbation; the efforts of some churches to convince homosexual men to adopt a heterosexual orientation; the dynamics of male envy of female longevity; the homosexual tendencies of King James of England and Scotland; and biblical portraits of God's body, gender, and sexuality. The authors make a special use of the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation-that is, the redirection of sexual desires that are considered unacceptable or unworthy toward interests and aspirations that are considered acceptable and worthy. While the use of psychoanalytic hermeneutics here is likely to raise various red flags for potential religious readers (especially for those who have been informed that Sigmund Freud was hostile toward religion), this book presents a rather different Freud by focusing on religious sublimation.

In Honour of Thomas Hopko

The news has been circulating for more than a week that the Orthodox presbyter and theologian Thomas Hopko is in his last days. I met him briefly once in 2008 at the Sheptytsky Institute's "Study Days" that summer. It was there, I think, that I first heard his "55 Maxims of the Christian Life." It was there that I came to admire him as a plain-spoken, pull-no-punches type of man who clearly had no patience for obfuscation and nonsense. He was faithful to Orthodoxy and in doing so was unwilling to trim his sails because of political pressure to "make nice" to others. Those traits were on display in his book Speaking The Truth In Love: Education, Mission, And Witness In Contemporary Orthodoxy.

I have not always agreed with Hopko, as I note in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. There I noted that on at least one occasion his spare style and restrained rhetoric seem to have been abandoned in favor of an absurdly inflationary list of things he wanted changed in the Roman Catholic Church. In his talk "Roman Presidency and Christian Unity in our Time," Hopko went on at length about dozens of issues that nobody else on the Orthodox side was writing or worrying about--nobody, that is, who was as intellectually serious as Hopko otherwise is. Moreover, as I argued, Hopko attributed--with enormous irony!--a massive power to the pope that (a) the pope has never had and today does not have; and (b) that the Orthodox would be the first to object to his having in the first place! I wrote off the paper as rather a fluke, and of the more than twenty Orthodox thinkers I reviewed in my book, demonstrated just how sui generis Hopko's list was. We all have bad days and bad ideas sometimes make it into print. This list did not affect my view that Hopko remains a serious and sober thinker.

But Hopko has produced other important books. Friends at Christmas several years ago gave Christ in the Old Testament: Prophecy Illustrated to my sons, and it is a charming and beautifully illustrated book thanks to the artistic talents of Niko Chocheli. 

Several years ago now when I was trying to write a book on the importance of a clearly defined theology of sexual differentiation--the real issue underlying the push for the ordination of women and the recognition of same-sex "marriage"--I found Hopko's edited collection Women and the Priesthood very prescient in his claim that

The question of women and the priesthood is but one important instance of what I perceive to be the most critical issue of our time: the issue of the meaning and purpose of the fact that human nature exists in two consubstantial forms: male and female. This is a new issue for Christians; it has not been treated properly in the past. But it cannot be avoided today.

Hopko went on to quote an even stronger formulation from (of all people) Luce Irigaray, who wrote that “Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. … Sexual difference is probably the issue of our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through." Such "thinking through" still awaits us, and I hope to finish an article on it perhaps late this summer.

Hopko, in a more focused treatment, returned to some of these issues in his short book Christian Faith and Same Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections.

As he prepares to "shuffle off this mortal coil" and stand before the "awesome tribunal of Christ," we can pray that because of these books and the rest of his life's work, he will hear the "Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your Lord" that we all long to hear on that day. 

Female Transvestite Monks Rock the Eastern Christian World: Details at 11!

You'd think I was merely trolling for traffic with a title like that, but believe it or not a new book by a reputable publisher treats this very topic. Coming out in November by Crystal Lynn Lubinski is Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity (Brepols, 2013), 250pp.

About this book we are told:

Female monks have been discussed within the spheres of socio-history, theology, and literary analysis, but no comprehensive study has focused on their historical and gendered context until now. This book reexamines their hagiographies to reveal that female protagonists possess a holy womanhood regardless of having layers of masculinity applied to their characters. Each masculine layer is scrutinized to explore its purpose in the plots and the plausible motivations for the utilization of transvestite figures in religious literature. Hagiographers had no intention of transforming their religious protagonists into anything but determined, holy women who are forced to act drastically in order to sustain ascetic dreams begun while mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters. Through an intertextual method, masculinity and literary themes work to contextualize praise for a holy womanhood within an acceptable gendered language, which seems to support a belief in the spiritual potential of women. This book highlights the potential for complex irony to develop around a female transvestite, which supplies religious tales with intrigue and interest, an ability to instruct/chastise mixed audiences, and a potential to portray the reversal inherent in the human drama of salvation.

Those who know Eastern Christian monasticism, both ancient and modern, will know this is not as weird as it sounds. There are examples of this kind of "cross-dressing" as recently as in St. Xenia of Petersburg as I have noted elsewhere on here. 

Oh, No, You're Not Wearing THAT to Church

Who among us--parents or children--has not argued over the "appropriateness" of wearing some get-up or other to church? Who among us, Pharisee-like, has not looked askance at something worn by our neighbor in the nearby pew and prayed "I thank thee Lord that thou didst not create me a slob like this poor fattie?" It seems to have been forever thus if a new book about Tertullian is any indication. 

Tertullian in the Latin tradition, like Origen in the Greek, is somewhat sui generis. Nevertheless, his influence was and is still considerable. A new book looks at what he thought and wrote about an issue that seems eternally to rile Christians: what to wear--to church and in general. Carly Daniel-Hughes, The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for the Resurrection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 192pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

Why did the influential Christian thinker, Tertullian of Carthage (160-220 C.E.), while addressing the critical issue of salvation of the flesh, write about clothing? Why did he care what Christians wore? Carly Daniel-Hughes answers that in early Christian communities clothing tied to identity and theology. Placing Tertullian’s writings in the Roman culture of dress, she shows that in them men’s dress is used to envision Christian masculinity as non-Roman and anti-imperial. His concerns about women’s dress, however, reveal internal Christian debates about the nature of the flesh and the possibility of its transformation in to a resurrected, glorious body.

God, Sex, and Gender

Adrian Thatcher's new book, God, Sex, and Gender: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), xii+271pp.
came to me in a hardcover textbook format. And that, indeed, is how it is written, as he makes clear in the introduction: for use as a textbook in an introductory or undergraduate survey course in theology or religious studies.  It is written with admirable clarity by an author who clearly takes almost nothing for granted--as one cannot do today with students, even those claiming to have grown up in a Christian home. Knowledge of Christian history, of doctrinal tradition, even of basic catechesis can no longer be assumed, alas. So students starting out with Thatcher's book will find it helpfully explains terminology and assumes little or no previous knowledge.

The book is, therefore, to be commended for its clarity and accessibility, at least as far as its prose goes. But students and others will find their knowledge of orthodox Christian doctrine--both East and West--darkened by the author's relentless agenda in pursuit of what he at least honestly calls "progressive or revisionist themes" (x) from his own Anglican background. If you were to re-title this book "An Apologia for Anglicanism's Sexual Heterodoxy" you would not be amiss.

Nevertheless, the author helpfully raises a number of important and useful questions about how Christians understand sex and gender. E.g., he rightly notes that "modern theological views of gender are essentialist" (19), and that raises all kinds of problems, as many others have noted over the years. He raises some interesting questions about what it means for Jesus Christ to be male and these questions have the salutary effect of at least disturbing people out of their mild, polite bourgeois notions of Jesus as this anodyne, perhaps even vaguely androgynous figure. At one point he discusses briefly and vaguely artistic representations of Jesus, but does not pay any attention to many important books treating icons of Christ, some of which often raise curious questions about "gender."

Thatcher helpfully--but too briefly--avers to the essay of Miroslav Volf in Gospel and Gender: A Trintarian Engagment with Being Male and Female in Christ. There, Volf argues that we cannot deny sexual difference between men and women, but ultimately we should look for its meaning not in cultural conventions, or extra-biblical, very modern, and, frankly, poorly argued theories of "complementarity." Rather, we should try to find "the significance of difference within God" (152). That is very true, but very much remains a desideratum in almost all such theological reflection today that I have seen.

Eastern Christian traditions are generally ignored unless they can be made to fit with Thacher's agenda. Section 3.1.1, "The Churches and the Sources" inexplicably and totally ignores the entire East, and instead concentrates on Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists--with a brief note about Southern Baptists preceding it. In general, one cannot rely on him to explain adequately or well traditional and o/Orthodox doctrine. In one place he writes, confusingly, "blessings are not marriages (even though the Orthodox Churches regard the blessing of the marrying couple as the priestly act that makes them married)" (179). It is not clear what that sentence is supposed to mean, but it seems that only a Western Christian could have written it. Western Christians, especially from the scholastic period onward, seem fascinated with (bothered by? obsessed over? guilty of fetishizing?) which "act" or "moment" is the one when the sacrament "really" happens. (To be fair, some Orthodox Christians, especially converts from Western traditions, are just as obsessive about, e.g., an "epiclesis.")

In sum, then, this book raises a few helpful questions, and offers some decent bibliographies at the end of each chapter for people wanting to read further. But it is, as noted above, very limited for all the reasons mentioned.

Sexual Difference in Paul

The well-known Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko has suggested in Women and the Priesthood that "the most critical issue of our time [is] the issue of the meaning and purpose of the fact that human nature exists in two consubstantial forms: male and female." Along comes a new book to help us explore this most critical of issues.
 
Benjamin Dunning of Fordham University's theology department has written a fascinating and closely argued book: Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), x+252pp.

Dunning, the author of Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity, here looks at how St. Paul's famous text in Galatians 3:28 ("There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus") has been interpreted, both within Paul's own day, and down the centuries since then. At every step, Dunning argues, such interpretive efforts have never been final or definitive, never able to resolve all the problems and tensions of sexual difference. There is, he says, a "constitutive instability at the heart of Paul's project that resists any final resolution" (2).

In addition to considering other Pauline texts that bear on this one (including I Cor. 12:13 and I Cor. 14), Dunning also looks at such important Eastern Christian figures as Clement of Alexandria (ch. 2) and Irenaeus of Lyons (ch. 4).

Dunning's stated goal in the book is to "explore the ghosts engendered by the tensions and aporias in Paul's reflections on what it means to be an embodied human being" (3). Such tensions existed already in Paul's day, and have led some recent scholars such as Daniel Boyarin to claim that "'On the issue of gender...Paul seems to have produced a discourse which is so contradictory as to be almost incoherent'" (6). Part of Dunning's task will be to see if Paul is indeed so incoherent and if so how that incoherence has become part of the Pauline legacy handed down to be grappled with by different succeeding generations. Dunning treats Paul, and other patristic, scriptural, and deuterocanonical sources, with the same balanced engagement that he brings to modern psychoanalytic and feminist authors. His tone throughout is consistently respectful but engaging. Most commendably, he is able to describe well what others have said without imposing his own agenda on them. This is a finely crafted work of scholarship.

Before getting into his arguments, Dunning takes time to deal with some crucial terminological issues, echoing the work of such well-known writers as Judith Butler who attempt to distinguish between "sex" and "gender." Dunning will use "sexual difference" most often as a term that "slides fluidly between sexually marked bodies, their psychic representations, and their constitution in historically variable cultural imaginaries" (15). He notes that this term "sexual difference" remains fraught with ambiguity and difficulty, not all of it problematic. Indeed the term's fluidity manifests what Dunning, quoting Butler, recognizes as "'the permanent difficulty of determining where the biological, the psychic, the discursive, the social begin and end'" (16). 

From here, Dunning's first chapter looks at the "disappearance" of the female into the male in some early Christian discourse: sexual difference here was merely one of gradations along a scale of "masculinity."

Chapter 2 takes us into more familiar "eschatological" territory by looking at the thought of Clement of Alexandria. Clement, believing that sexual difference antedates the fall, clearly holds that "the difference between male and female is a temporary element of human existence to be shed at the eschaton" (51)--an idea in Clement other scholars, including John Behr, have noted. And yet this idea sits uneasily, Dunning demonstrates, with Clement's other notions, similar to those discussed in chapter 1, of the centrality of the masculine. Dunning puts the question thus: "How can Clement maintain an autonomous masculine in an eschatological economy in which desire has been eradicated? The solution he offers to this dilemma is the eradication of sexual difference in all its aspects (female and male) at the resurrection" (55).

Clement, perhaps surprisingly, is able to envisage a fundamental equality between male and female, arguing in the Paedagogus that "'the same virtue (ten auten areten) is characteristic of both man and woman'" (68). In the end, Dunning concludes, Clement does not resolve what Dunning later calls "the intractable problem... of assigning a stable and theologically coherent significance to the sexually differentiated body" (153).

Skipping over chapter 3, which, in my judgment fits unclearly and uneasily with the rest of his argument, we come to chapter four and another important Eastern figure to tackle this problem. Irenaeus of Lyons, takes, Dunning shows, a very different approach. Irenaeus's eschatological vision is the opposite of Clement: "At the resurrection sexual difference will not fall away....Indeed there is something unthinkable for Irenaeus about an eschaton that elides or erases sexual difference" (106).

In the end, Dunning concludes this fascinating and closely argued book (only some of which I have described above) by arguing that "a necessary instability in the very categories that constitute theological anthropology" is not a bad thing. Indeed, he puts it more strongly than that: "these cracks need not be construed as an ethical failure....Precisely the failure to produce a definitive story for sexually differentiated theological anthropology has the potential to force open the space for other kinds of stories" (155). He ends Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought by citing the familiar words of Luce Irigaray : "'Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time that could be our 'salvation' is we thought it through'" (156). Dunning is to be congratulated for his cogent and compelling contribution to just that very thinking through, a contribution that, rightly, does not answer all the questions, but knows which questions to raise and helps us see how earlier generations of Christians dealt with them.