Abstract
The article takes up the biblical category of “headship,” one of the “third rails” for Christians in a context dominated by the limited conceptions of equality, especially those assumed by “second wave” and “difference” feminism, viz., that of interchangeable sameness and unbridgeable difference. Headship is easily dismissed as an instance of (bad) cultural influence that spoiled Christianity’s egalitarian beginnings. Less radically, headship is simply avoided, or glossed over with apologetic caveats. Headship is an embarrassment, because it suggests not only exclusive differences—the “head” is not the “body”—but an order between them. Head and body are “subject to each other” in distinct and coordinated ways. In what follows, the author claims that headship is not only not an affront to equality, but its very condition between subjects who belong to each other in a generous relation of reciprocal and fruitful unity and distinction. Moreover, it is the expression of the novelty of Christianity, regarding first of all the nature of God in whom there is an original Head, and a “positive other,” without any hint of subordinationism (inequality). On the contrary, the Father is never absolute, but always already determined by the Son. This original headship then informs the Christian conception of the world, its positivity, even to the point that it can give something to God. Finally, it informs the this-worldly headships (Christ–Church and husband–wife). There, headship counters the status quo, by countering the “body’s” default immanentistic “certainty” about her exclusive life-giving power, enjoining her to acknowledge a transcendent source. It restores equality to the head. For the “head,” it counters the false absolutist image of God, while enjoining him to “radiate” something of which he is first “subject,” to “be involved with,” and determined by, the woman, as a positive other. It restores equality to the body. In sum, the article urges us to turn towards the deepest resources of Christianity, to find therein a more fruitful equality.
Highlights
To a feminist, there is nothing so loathsome as an order between man and woman
The Father is never absolute, but always already determined by the Son. This original headship informs the Christian conception of the world, its positivity, even to the point that it can give something to God
The idea immediately suggests a relation between a superior and an inferior, a norm and its aberration, a primary and a second best, between two who are, in sum, not equals. This objection is most notably expressed by the author of The Second Sex, when she turns to the Biblical expression of that order in the second chapter of Genesis
Summary
There is nothing so loathsome as an order between man and woman. The idea immediately suggests a relation between a superior and an inferior, a norm and its aberration, a primary and a second best, between two who are, in sum, not equals. The Son is not the Father, The Church is not Christ, the woman is not the man, the body is not the head Because this principle of generosity stands at the origin of their unity, the union between the subjects never tends towards the overcoming of the difference (back to an “original” state), the one blending into the other (“modally,” as it were), the second reduced back to the first. In the dogma of the Trinity, the Persons must be equal in dignity in order to safeguard the distinction that makes the triune God subsistent love; in a similar way the Church stresses the equal dignity of man and woman, so that the extreme oppositeness of their functions may guarantee the spiritual and physical fruitfulness of human nature. Assuming the orthodox coincidence between order and equality, we turn unflinchingly to one of the major sources of “embarrassment” for Christianity, its category of headship on the assumption that it offers to men and women a more satisfying equality, not one between mutually indifferent, interchangeable, and sterile subjects, but between two in an original (good) and fruitful unity in distinctness, one which bears the distinction between God and the “good creation” and, behind that, the Unity in distinction of God himself
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