The Offense of the Incarnation
On the 'Equality' of Gender Feminism
Dale O'Leary
October 1, 1995
From the first centuries, many have been offended by the fact that God who is spirit should become flesh-bloody, throbbing, living human meat. The incarnation-this God in meat-changes forever the way we look at all reality, for the stuff of the created world has been united with its Creator. In the early centuries of the Church's existence, the refusal to accept the fleshy reality of the incarnation produced a number of heresies. The squeamish could not embrace the truth that the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, true God from true God, came down from heaven and was made man. Just as the early heresies tried to find a way around the theological implications of the incarnation, today some feminist theologians are offended by the reality that God became incarnate as a human male. This rejection of the incarnation can be traced to a major paradigm shift that occurred in the women's movement. In the 1960s the women's movement was revived with an emphasis on equal political and economic rights for women. However, by the 1970s the battle for equality had shifted from a battle for equal rights, education, and opportunity based on the equal dignity of men and women as human beings. It had become a battle for statistically equal participation in society's activities, power, and rewards. This redefinition of equality was based on a redefinition of sexual identity. The term "sex" had been used to refer to everything that characterized the differences between male and female. The new paradigm severed "sex," now to refer only to biological differences, from "gender." A term previously used to make grammatical distinctions now referred to all the differences between men and women that are culturally or socially ...
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