VIII The irrelevance argument
Geoffrey Kirk considers whether the maleness of Jesus has no 'soteriological' significance
Some phrases are difficult to pin down. What might it mean to say that the maleness of Jesus is not 'soteriologically' significant? For the present purposes I am going to assume that it means that God could as well have been incarnate as a woman as a man, and that humankind could as well be saved by a female as by a male incarnation.
Of course it is true that Christian people believe that God is sovereign; that he can do, and does, what he wills. But this belief does not mean that he can do anything. Some exercises of the divine will curtail or entail others.
If, for example, God chose, in the beginning, to create men and women as sexual beings ('male and female he created them') and gave to those beings differential characteristics, capabilities and patterns of behaviour, he is thereafter bound by his act of creation. He will have to deal with women and men in accordance with the nature and predispositions which he himself gave them.
Salvation history
The dealings of God with his creatures are revealed to us in holy Scripture in what is sometimes called salvation
history. And this is precisely what it is - a narrative or story. It has all the normal characteristics of narrative, including plot and characterization.
The story of our salvation has aptly been described as a tale of the redemption of (overwhelmingly male) violence and sin by a male redeemer who meets, absolves and heals the consequences of that sin. The question needs to be asked: is it remotely imaginable that the foundational narrative of Christian history could revolve around the crucifixion of a female saviour? And the answer must surely be that it is not; for then the resonances
throughout salvation history, which deepen our understanding of the crucial event, would simply not apply.
Jesus, after all, is not just the son of Mary. He is also in his human person, one who fulfils immemorial scriptural patterns: he is a second Abel, another Isaac, one who like Joseph is slain by his brothers but who feeds them with the finest wheat.
Crucifying the images
It will be objected that God is above and beyond such images and that redemption is something apart from them. But not so. The story is brought to its conclusion and we are set free from the images to apprehend the reality, only when Jesus Christ clothes himself in all the images of
Jewish history and messianic prophecy and lives them out.
He crucifies the images, as he himself is crucified. The mystery is this: that the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy. This is how the children of God are delivered from idols.
Confounding expectations
Feminists have looked at the stories of the Old and New Testaments and seen in them patterns of patriarchal oppression - and not entirely without justification. But all too often they have missed the paradox of the overarching narrative: the reversal of roles and the confounding of expectations. ('The first shall be last and the last first...')
In order to act out the images and at the
same time to turn them upside down the redeemer needed, in terms of the story which had its beginnings in the creation of male and female, to be a male. Any other story would be a different story altogether.
Everyone knows the archetypal feminist Christmas card: the shepherds hurry to the manger to be greeted by a jubilant Mary: 'It's a girl!' But roles which have persisted down millennia of history are not so easily reversed.
So much of the feminist project has been set forward by the policing of pronouns, even in Scripture itself. But Story is resistant to historical tinkering of that kind. Change sex, and meaning itself is changed, at the most basic level. The second Adam cannot be another Eve.