Gender and Religion: Gender and Christianity. TINA BEATTIE. Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. Vol. 5. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. p3356-3364. 15 vols.
Christianity has always been a gendered tradition—as indeed have most religions—insofar as sexual difference has formed an organizing focus for its doctrines, practices, and institutions. This has been more evident in Catholic and Orthodox forms of Christianity than in Protestantism, but the gendered hierarchies that have prevailed in Christian institutions from the time of Saint Paul persisted largely unchallenged until the middle of the twentieth century. Since then churches have faced a widespread intellectual challenge to their understanding of gender, arising partly out of the influence of feminism but primarily generated by a significant number of women becoming academic theologians and biblical scholars for the first time in history. Rosemary Radford Ruether's pioneering work of feminist theology, Sexism and God-Talk, first published in 1983, asks, "Can a male savior save women?" (Ruether, 1993, p. 116).
As a growing number of feminist theologians and, more recently, gender theorists have developed ever more refined forms of analysis in their studies of Christian doctrine, history, spirituality, and ethics, Ruether's question opens into a complex landscape in which the sexed human body occupies a central but often veiled position, inviting both redemptive and critical readings of tradition. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's (1983) advocacy of "a hermeneutics of suspicion" has influenced two generations of biblical scholars whose increasingly nuanced methods of interpretation are transforming the ways in which biblical texts are understood and applied with regard to gender constructs and sexual relationships. Although Western in origin, these intellectual revolutions have impacted non-Western cultures, so the question of Christianity and gender has become one of far-reaching significance for the doctrines and practices of the churches worldwide.
However, feminist and gender studies have so far been more thorough in their analyses of femininity and womanhood than of masculinity and manhood, so much of what still passes for normative humanity in Christian texts and practices is in fact male humanity, misleadingly represented as the generic human being. Until this masculine particularity is acknowledged, the Christian understanding of the human condition will continue to be shaped by implicitly androcentric perspectives. Despite forty years of feminist scholarship, the theological establishment remains, for the most part, highly conservative, and perspectives informed by feminism or gender theory are either ignored or marginalized in the majority of theological curricula.
If traditional Christian beliefs and practices have been problematized by feminism and gender studies, the question also arises as to how far these academic debates reflect the concerns of people's daily lives as they seek to live out their Christian faith in different contexts. For many, traditional forms of Christianity provide a bulwark against what are perceived to be the corrosive effects of secularization and materialism on religious values, and this generates considerable resistance to feminism. Given that a majority of women worldwide continue to regard the family as their most significant area of responsibility and commitment, the Christian defense of the family might in many situations be an important factor in the struggle for gender justice. In other situations, however, Christian beliefs associated with marriage, motherhood, fertility, and sexuality define women too narrowly in terms of domestic roles and responsibilities, so Christian family values can be experienced as repressive in terms of gender justice and human flourishing. Such questions feed into the larger question about what is meant by "the full humanity of woman" and what kind of transformations of belief and practice are necessary for Christianity to create a spiritual and social environment in which both sexes are able to live out the belief that human beings, male and female, are made in the image of God and are called to participate in the creative activity of God in sustaining, healing, and shaping the world (Ruether, 1993, p. 18).
The phrase gender and Christianity therefore opens into a kaleidoscopic range of insights that is constantly refigured as new perspectives come into view. As the scholarship of gender becomes more critically refined, early feminist critiques of religious traditions are being supplanted by methods that seek greater sensitivity to questions of historical, cultural, sexual, racial, and economic diversity. There is also a growing attentiveness to issues of gender at the more conservative end of the Christian theological spectrum, so the study of gender, sexuality, and embodiment is by no means the exclusive preserve of feminist scholars. What follows then is a brief overview of a picture that is in an ongoing state of development, so summarizing general trends necessarily risks some misrepresentation of the individual lives and communities that make up the gendered dimensions of the Christian story.
The Christian tradition has been marked by deep ambivalences with regard to the significance of human embodiment and gender in terms of both sexual and social relationships. Christianity has always affirmed the goodness of the material world, including the human body, as having been created by God and redeemed by Jesus Christ. However, Christianity has also tended to adopt a negative attitude toward the body in recognition of its susceptibility to suffering and death, which are associated with sin. The original goodness of creation is believed to have been distorted by the effects of humanity's rebellion against God, and thus the body is a site of particular struggle and conflict in the Christian's desire to be reconciled to God. In terms of sexuality this has become deeply bound up with issues of temptation, sin, and fallenness, symbolically associated with Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden, so a great deal of Christian anxiety has been focused on human sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular. Given the opaque and sometimes inscrutable relationship between gender constructs and sexual embodiment, this makes the task of unraveling Christian beliefs about gender particularly difficult, because embedded deep within these one often encounters a cluster of unacknowledged fears to do with the female body. In this Christianity may not be different from many other religions, but the Christian doctrines of the incarnation of Christ and the resurrection of the body mean that, in theory at least, this should be the most body-affirming of all religions. That its legacy has been more ambiguous is at least partly bound up with the ongoing failure of some parts of the Christian tradition to fully incorporate human sexuality into their vision of the goodness of creation.
The Christian understanding of human nature is premised on a belief in the dignity and equality of every human being in the eyes of God, and the Christian community of the baptized has been represented as one in which all divisions are overcome. Thus in his Letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). However, for most of Christian history women have occupied positions of subordination to men, being subject to restrictions that have precluded the full participation of both sexes in the formation of Christian faith and practice.
The New Testament texts and Apocryphal literature of the first three centuries attest to a struggle by male authority figures to control and delineate the role of women in Christian life and worship, suggesting a trend toward women holding positions of authority in some parts of the early church and a resistance to this trend in other parts. Whatever equality women may have enjoyed in these early centuries, however, their roles soon became circumscribed within authority structures modeled on the social order of imperial Rome. As a result, the institutions, beliefs, and practices of the Christian tradition have been constructed around the values of a patriarchal hierarchy, in which the authority of a Father-God is mediated through descending ranks of paternal leadership, from kings, princes, and bishops to lords, leaders, husbands, and fathers. Some feminist theologians argue that this patriarchal structure is consolidated and perpetuated in the centrality of the Father-Son relationship to the Christian understanding of Jesus as the Son of God.
However, this largely homogenous master narrative needs to be understood in relation to the diverse contexts that have allowed a plurality of beliefs, devotions, and relationships to flourish within Christian traditions. If gendered hierarchies have been carefully preserved in the texts and institutions of the church, attentiveness to the practices of Christianity suggests a more complex reality of shifting sexual relationships and values. For example, Christian men whose writings express misogynistic ideas have often enjoyed close relationships with women in the roles of spiritual director, confessor, and friend, suggesting a level of social and sexual interaction that may not be reflected in the textual legacy. Women such as Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), whose writings suggest the internalization of sexual stereotypes, often used these as rhetorical devices to challenge male authority figures. Moreover, although the body has always been more determinative for women than for men and female embodiment continues to function as a basis for exclusion rather than inclusion, for example, with regard to ordination in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, gender was understood symbolically rather than biologically in the premodern church. So in different contexts maternal or feminine characteristics have been attributed to men and masculine characteristics to women to express certain social functions or personal characteristics. Moreover theological relationships between God, creation, Christ, the church, and Mary are described in a range of nuptial and familial metaphors and analogies, so it is impossible to identify any straightforward binary opposition between male and female when one analyzes the dynamics of Christian gender symbolism.
The separation between Eastern and Western Christianity since the eleventh century has also produced different concepts of the significance of gender. The Orthodox Church, influenced by thinkers such as Origen (c. 185–254) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395), holds that matter, including the sexual human body, is a secondary feature of creation. Sexual embodiment is contingent upon the coming of death into the world and the need for procreation, so sexual difference does not have ontological significance and will not be a feature of the resurrected person. From the time of Augustine (345–430), the Roman Catholic tradition has understood the material world, including the sexed human body, as part of the original goodness of creation and therefore as ontologically significant. The resurrected body will be male or female, just as it was in the beginning. In the Orthodox Church, the Virgin Mary represents an iconic and mystical maternal presence at the heart of liturgy and prayer, symbolizing both awe and compassion but dissociated from later Western ideas of maternal femininity. Catholic representations of Mary have been influenced by cultural stereotypes associated with humanism, the Renaissance, and Romanticism, so that they have become heavily invested with changing ideals of motherhood and femininity. These symbolic representations both reflect and shape social values and meanings, so many different ways of seeing and relating are encoded within them in terms of gender, society, and doctrine. Since the Reformation, the increasing diversification of Christianity has led to multiple ways of understanding gender relations. Whereas the mainstream Protestant denominations have tended to uphold traditional gender distinctions and hierarchies, at least until the latter part of the twentieth century, movements such as Quakerism have been more egalitarian in their ideas and practices. Protestantism has by and large placed less emphasis on the symbolic or philosophical significance of sexuality, and therefore its representation of sexual difference has been expressed more in biblical and moral terms than in terms of eschatology, ontology, and symbolism.
The Bible is a necessary but not a sufficient starting point for any study of Christianity and gender. From as early as the first century CE the Christian belief that God had become human in Jesus Christ was interpreted according to the symbolism of the Genesis narrative of creation and the Fall. This means that the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 1–3 has had a formative influence on Christian beliefs about the divine image and the relationship between the sexes, understood both in terms of the original relationship among God, nature, woman, and man and in terms of the fall and its aftermath.
Christ is described as the Second Adam in the Pauline epistles, and by the end of the first century this imagery had been extended to include the Virgin Mary as the New Eve in the writings of Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 CE) and Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 130–200 CE). According to this interpretation, just as the first woman, Eve, brought death to the human race by disobeying God and eating the forbidden fruit, so the New Eve, first woman of the new creation in Christ, brought life to the human race by obeying God by agreeing to become the mother of the savior, Jesus Christ. This identification of Mary with Eve became invested with the language of sexuality, seduction, and sin associated with Eve and purity, obedience, and grace associated with Mary in a way that introduced a dualistic tendency into the Christian understanding of woman. In addition the Christian belief that patriarchal hierarchies are ordained by God for the good ordering of society has been justified through an appeal to the order of creation in Genesis 2, in which God created the woman after the man to be his helpmate.
The influential biblical scholar Phyllis Trible challenges this interpretation by offering a careful analysis of the language and meanings of the Hebrew text, and there is now widespread scholarly acceptance that a pervasive ideology of gender has shaped Christian readings of Genesis. Biblical writings about God, humankind, and sexual difference have also been interpreted by Christians through the lens of the Greek philosophical tradition, so the Genesis narrative has been overlaid with concepts about the essential nature of femininity and masculinity that are alien to the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures. Thus Christianity has to a large extent constructed its understanding of gender not only around the Bible but around philosophical beliefs that associate masculinity with reason, transcendence, virtue, and divinity and femininity with emotion, immanence, moral weakness, and the body.
Although the interpretation of Genesis is crucial for an understanding of the symbolic construction of gender in Christianity, the New Testament offers numerous insights into the historical role of women as well as men in the ministry of Jesus and the early church. The Gospels, in particular the Gospels according to Luke and John, represent women as faithful disciples of Jesus, participating in his public ministry in a way that may have defied the sociosexual conventions of first-century Palestine. Figures such as Martha and Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman at the well, and Mary the mother of Jesus feature at significant moments in the Gospel stories not as silent and submissive followers but as women who often appear to challenge or question Jesus and to contribute to a deeper understanding of his mission. Saint Paul's letters name a number of women who were leaders and patrons of early Christian communities. They include Prisca, Phoebe, and Junia, the latter two referred to as a deacon and an apostle respectively (Rom. 16). However, the Deutero-Pauline and Pastoral epistles represent a more complex picture with regard to gender relations. They include instructions to women to submit to men's authority in the church (compare 1 Tm. 11–15) and to be subject to their husbands (compare Col. 3:18, Eph. 5:22) while enjoining husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church (compare Eph. 5:25).
Studies of the early church suggest that women had considerable influence in the formative years of Christianity, with Apocryphal literature of the second century, such as the Acts of Thecla and the Gospel of Mary, providing rich additional sources to the biblical text. Whether these stories are rooted in history or legend, they are indicative of a complex process of negotiation and conflict around issues of gender and leadership in early Christianity.
The first four centuries after Christ saw the transition of Christianity from a marginal and persecuted minority to the official religion of the Roman Empire. In her study of patristic theology, Virginia Burrus argues that the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity created a crisis of identity for the church's male leaders, who found themselves having to occupy positions of authority defined according to imperial criteria of manliness. She suggests that this identity crisis had a lasting influence on Christian gender constructs in terms of masculine subjectivity, feminine alterity, and the fatherhood of God.
If women lost some of their early influence with the growing institutionalization of the church, they nevertheless continued to play a significant role in Christian leadership and theological reflection in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Although this was an era when the lives of the vast majority of men and women escape the historical record, evidence exists that women were included among the educated elite who ran the monasteries and religious institutions of the early medieval world. Abbesses such as Hilda of Whitby (d. 680), Lioba (700–780) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) were responsible for mixed monasteries in which women as well as men were educated in the context of religious life. The emergence of women's historians since the 1960s has seen a growing body of scholarship devoted to the recuperation of these neglected historical figures.
However, the eleventh-century Gregorian reforms marked the beginning of an era in which power in the church became more centralized and clericalized, which made it more difficult for women to gain access to theological education or positions of religious authority.
The establishment of the schools and universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries restricted theological education to celibate male scholars, and the institution of compulsory priestly celibacy intensified misogynistic attitudes toward women and female sexuality, assisted by the widespread dissemination of Aristotelian philosophy through the influence of Scholasticism. Women became more closely associated with the affective, devotional life of faith expressed in the vernacular, whereas male clerics became the custodians of theology and doctrine expressed in the highly stylized Latin of Scholasticism, signaling the beginning of a linguistic and conceptual division between Christian theology and spirituality that would have considerable implications for the understanding of gender.
Yet these changes also brought new opportunities for the expression of women's spirituality that appealed not to the authenticating norms of theology for its legitimacy but to a direct encounter with divine revelation. The next few centuries saw the emergence of women mystics, such as Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416) and Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), whose ideas have had an enduring influence on the Catholic tradition. The Beguines, a lay movement of women that flourished across northern Europe from the late twelfth century, produced a number of women spiritual writers, such as Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1212–1282), author of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Hadewjich of Antwerp (thirteenth century), and Marguerite Porete (1280–1310), author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, who was burned at the stake for heresy. The Beguines were condemned at the Council of Vienne (1311–1312) and had virtually disappeared by the early fifteenth century, attesting perhaps to the vulnerability of women's religious visions and practices in male-dominated traditions. Their male counterparts, the Beghards, were numerically less significant, but they too fell under suspicion of heresy and immoral practices.
The twelfth century also saw the emergence of a new trend in Christian spirituality that affected both men's and women's devotional writings. From the time of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the Song of Songs became a key text for the expression of the Christian longing for Christ, leading to forms of prayer and devotion in which the soul is represented as the feminine beloved and bride of Christ, expressing "herself" in sometimes highly eroticized metaphors of feminine desire. This constituted a significant change in the Christian understanding of gender, which had until then associated femininity unambiguously with frailty, moral weakness, and carnal susceptibility, with masculine virtue being the Christian ideal for both sexes. The emergence of a more positive understanding of femininity in Christian spirituality was partly due to the influence of the courtly love tradition, with the language of the troubadours being appropriated to express the feminine soul's desire for Christ or the celibate male's devotion to the Virgin Mary. Much work remains to be done on the ways in which this feminized language of prayer and mysticism bears the marks of sexual difference, but scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum (1992) and Grace Jantzen (1995) see a tendency to focus more directly on the body and on physical manifestations of devotion associated with the Eucharist and with practices of asceticism and self-mortification in women's writings. Bynum suggests that the medieval belief that associated the soul with masculine divinity and the body with the female flesh coupled with belief in the virgin birth, which eliminated the male body's role in the conception of Christ, led women to identify Christ's humanity with their own female embodiment.
The medieval church was part of a complex social world that offered limited opportunities to women but that also celebrated motherhood as a flourishing social institution. The church itself was a Holy Mother whose sacraments were woven into the practices of everyday life, including women's domestic activities associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The image of the Virgin Mary as a solitary and unique example of womanhood, "Alone of All Her Sex," to quote the title of Marina Warner's (2000) influential book, is challenged by medieval art and devotion that suggest a more communal sense of female sainthood, with the Apocryphal figure of Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, occupying a position in fifteenth-century devotion second only to that of her illustrious daughter. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the cult of Saint Joseph, the putative father of Christ, began to eclipse that of Saint Anne, so the matriarchal groupings of medieval art and devotion were gradually replaced by the more modern grouping of the Holy Family comprising Mary, Joseph, and the infant Christ.
However, the fifteenth century also brought a new threat to women in the form of the witch hunts, which altogether spanned some four hundred years of Western history, from 1400 to 1800. It is impossible to calculate how many witch trials there were, but conservative estimates are in the range of 60,000 to 100,000 people killed, of whom two-thirds were women, including Joan of Arc (1412–1431). Recent scholarship suggests that these women were victims not primarily of medieval Catholicism, as has often been believed, but of the combined forces of science, rationalism, and religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which recorded the greatest number of witch trials. It is impossible to calculate the impact of the witch hunts on the development of Christian thought and practice when one considers that the tens of thousands killed were probably among the most creative and independent-minded of Europe's Christian women, and the fate they suffered must have silenced many others who may otherwise have written and spoken out. It must, however, be borne in mind that this wave of destruction spanned the late medieval and early modern period, and therefore, from the historical perspective of women, to some extent it overshadows the Reformation.
The Reformation saw the emergence of new forms of Christianity, in which the sacramentality and symbolism of the medieval Catholic Church yielded to a more literate and moralistic form of Christianity based on the authority of Scripture and on individual faith in Jesus Christ. Although this did little to destabilize the gendered hierarchies of Christian theology and practice, it did provide limited opportunities for women to play an active role in the development of new Christian communities and churches. Reformers such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) rejected the Catholic belief that celibacy was a higher ideal than married life, so marriage came to be understood in more positive terms as a partnership of love and mutual support. However, the vocation to religious life had provided medieval women with an alternative to the often oppressive demands of marriage and motherhood, and some scholars, including William Monter (1987) and Merry Wiesner (1990), argue that women after the Reformation became more narrowly identified with the domestic sphere, with a subsequent loss of public influence and visibility. Moreover the Reformation purged Protestant Christianity of maternal feminine imagery associated with the Virgin Mary, the women saints, and the maternal church, contributing to the emergence of a culture that was more vigorously patriarchal and masculine in its values, politics, and beliefs. With the transition to an increasingly scientific and rationalized worldview after the seventeenth century, the symbolic and spiritual significance of gender began to yield to a more literalistic understanding of human sexuality, so the sexed body increasingly became positioned not in terms of its sacramental and social significance but in terms of scientific definitions and moral prescriptions.
The Enlightenment constituted a change from a social order grounded in the appeal to divine revelation and scriptural authority to a vision of society informed by a belief in reason, personal liberty, and the social contract. This did not immediately change the status of women, and indeed its initial impact on women's lives may have been far from positive, but it laid the foundations for the liberal democracies in which women have ultimately gained a degree of social and political recognition that they were never able to achieve under the theocracies of the Christian tradition. Yet if the male philosophers of the Enlightenment saw a fundamental conflict between reason and faith (even though their ideas remained deeply rooted in Christian theology), it is by no means certain that women shared this perception. Gerda Lerner, in the introduction to the second volume of her study of Women and History (1993), describes how she discovered "the significance to women of their relationship to the Divine and the profound impact the severing of that relationship had on the history of women. … The insight that religion was the primary arena on which women fought for hundreds of years for feminist consciousness was not one I had previously had" (Lerner, 1993, pp. vii–viii). Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), widely recognized as an early pioneer of the feminist movement, based her appeal for women's equality not only on Enlightenment values of reason, education, and the individual's right to political and social participation but on her faith in the compassion, wisdom, and mercy of God. If in the early twenty-first century those Enlightenment values are in their twilight years and new, as yet unpredictable, forms of social organization are appearing on the horizon, it remains to be seen to what extent Christianity may continue to offer women a language of divine wisdom to counter the political and social prejudices of powerful men.
The industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism in Protestant societies saw the establishment of what in the early twenty-first century some refer to as the traditional Christian family, although in reality this modern concept does not reflect the diverse social arrangements of the premodern family. Working-class life has rarely allowed men and women the luxury of playing out gendered stereotypes, but the image of Christian family life became identified in the nineteenth century with the clearly delineated gender roles and relationships of the middle classes. While the husband went out to work in commerce and industry where Christian ideals were inevitably compromised, the wife and mother, the "angel in the home," upheld Christian faith and values in the domestic realm. Thus nineteenth-century Protestant piety was to some extent associated with the sphere of femininity, with a gentle Jesus reflecting a domesticated ideal embodied in the good wife. Indeed during the nineteenth century church congregations were increasingly made up of more women than men, suggesting a gradual withdrawal of men from religion. The mid-1850s saw the emergence of "muscular Christianity," associated with writers such as Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley and later influencing American ministers such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This trend, which emphasized the masculinity of Christ and the manly virtues of the Christian faith, may have been a backlash against the perceived feminization of the churches and against the nascent women's movement.
However, these dominant social paradigms should not be allowed to eclipse the more radical opportunities that Christianity continued to offer to women. Josephine Butler (1828–1906) and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) were activists whose work was rooted in a radical Christian theology and a profound personal piety. Butler's work with prostitutes exposed and challenged the trenchant hypocrisies of Victorian England, a society in which a rigid morality defined by Christian values masked the widespread exploitation and abuse of the poor and a flourishing sex trade in the cities. Evangelicalism afforded nineteenth-century Western women a public space from which to speak as missionaries, social reformers, and educators, even if their activities continued to be defined and restricted by men. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of new women's religious communities in the Catholic Church, with the formation of religious orders committed to mission, education, and health care. Again these belonged within ecclesial and social structures governed by men, but they provided a means by which women could make a significant contribution to the public dimension of Christian life, extending their influence beyond the domestic sphere and allowing for considerable levels of social mobility and spiritual influence. In the United States the woman's suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) pioneered what one day became feminist biblical criticism, and Harriet Tubman (1819/1820–1913) was one of many African American women whose triumphs over slavery inspired later generations of Christian theologians and writers. The emergence of independent African American churches in nineteenth-century America created a form of Protestant Christianity enlivened by the rhythms and gestures of African music, dance, and spirituality, which has afforded African American men and women a space in which to express their Christian faith free from the oppressive influences of racism and white domination. American feminist theologians and gender theorists in the twenty-first century work at a complex intersection of questions having to do with gender, race, and class in their explorations of the relationships among slavery, gender injustice, and Protestantism in the formation of modern American social values.
The twentieth century saw the widespread demise of the Christian faith across much of Western society, at least in its traditional and institutionalized forms, accompanied by a rapid growth in Christianity in some non-Western cultures, most notably in Africa and South Korea. The changed horizons opened by feminist and postcolonialist perspectives have brought new challenges and opportunities to Christian theology, as some of its most fundamental doctrinal and ethical claims have been called into question. The emergence of the contemporary women's movement in Western society coincided with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), an epoch-making event in the Catholic Church that opened the way to a much greater degree of participation by women and other previously excluded groups in theological reflection and formation. The result has been the ongoing transformation of Christian theology and practice, as theologically educated men and women address questions of doctrine, sexuality, social justice, and gender relations from an increasingly wide spectrum of cultural, economic, and intellectual localities. By the end of the twentieth century women were being ordained as priests and ministers in numerous Christian denominations, including the Church of England, with women bishops being ordained in some parts of the worldwide Anglican communion, and the issue of women's ordination became an increasingly divisive question in the Roman Catholic Church. According to the religioustolerance.org website, one in every eight American clergy is a woman, and in 1997 women constituted 30 percent of North American theology graduates (see http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg6.htm). Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality have been challenged by the decline in marriage and rising divorce rates in Western societies. This has been accompanied by a growing desire for religious recognition and affirmation at all levels of church life by gays and lesbians in Western churches, to the consternation of many non-Western Christians who remain committed to a more conservative understanding of Christian sexual values.
These challenging new movements have provoked a backlash, with the reassertion of conservative values in both the Catholic and the Protestant churches and the emergence of fundamentalist Christian movements that tend to adopt a highly literalist approach to biblical teachings on questions of sexual ethics and gender relations. In the United States the organization Promise Keepers seeks to reestablish Christian family values by appealing to men to accept their responsibilities as husbands and fathers, with the concomitant expectation that women should perform their roles as dutiful wives and mothers. In Roman Catholicism the papacy of John Paul II has been remarkable in many ways, but it has seen the reassertion of traditional sexual values and gender stereotypes over some of the liberating tendencies of the postconciliar church. Perhaps the most traumatic event in this context was the publication of the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, by Pope Paul VI in 1968. This set out a vision of marriage that was revolutionary in its affirmation of the value of married love and sexuality but that, in its reiteration of the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial birth control, provoked an ongoing crisis of authority in the Catholic Church.
The social, demographic, and intellectual developments of the twentieth century mean that Christianity is undergoing a continuing crisis in its understanding of gender and sexuality, calling into question beliefs, practices, and authority structures that have prevailed almost unchallenged since the fourth century with regard to the different roles of men and women, the significance of human sexuality, and the ways in which these have been inspired and legitimated by the Christian understanding of God. It is impossible to predict what the church of the twenty-second century may look like or to what extent it will make sense to speak of the church at all. Some may see the future as a series of schisms, reformations, and revolutions that will lead to a global plurality of movements, sects, and cults loosely rooted in the Christian tradition, whereas others may have a more positive view of the Christian potential for unity and reconciliation after centuries of conflict and division. But it is likely that, whatever other changes take place, the Christian understanding of what it means to be male and female created in the image of God is one of the most urgent and complex questions of this age, and the ways in which Christians respond to that question will shape the churches of the future in profound and unforeseeable ways.