Priscilla Papers 31.1 | Winter 2017

VOLUME 31, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2017 “PRISCILLA AND AQUILA INSTRUCTED APOLLOS MORE”PERFECTLY IN THE WAY OF THE LORD” (ACTS 18)”

PAPERS 3 Nurturing Voyeurism, Vibrant

Sexism, and Violence: Why We Can’t (Yet) Afford to Forget about Wild at Heart Philip T. Duncan

9 Incarnational Friendship:

A Feminist- and WomanistInspired Revision of Luther’s “Happy Exchange” Theory of Atonement Joseph Morgan-Smith

15 Against Eternal Submission:

Changing the Doctrine of the Trinity Endangers the Doctrine of Salvation and Women D. Glenn Butner Jr.

24 Truth Be Told: Leveraging

Mujerista and Womanist Theologies for Ministry Among Victims and Survivors of Sex Trafficking Valerie Geer

Chr istians for Biblical Equality | www.cbeinter national.org

The theme of this issue of Priscilla Papers is Theology. The cover photo is Martin Luther, one of the world’s best-known theologians. He is the topic of one of our articles; moreover, 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

I am writing this in San Antonio, Texas, at the 2016 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society.

The word “theology” can be used in several overlapping ways. The name “Evangelical Theological Society” uses it somewhat broadly, for the Society and its annual meeting include specialists such as Old Testament scholars, church historians, and philosophers of religion. But within that broad gathering of theologians is a subset whom we might call “theologians proper.” I am referring to people, for example, who have the word “theology” on their diploma or in their job title.

Another use of the word is broader still: “We are all theologians.” “Everyone has a theology.” These statements are true, but clearly they use the word differently than one uses it, for example, in an academic article or a seminary catalog.

It is also common to append “theology” with a short descriptive phrase, hence “theology of work” or “theology of marriage.” Some fields of theological inquiry are so common that they have their own name; thus a theology of the church is an ecclesiology and a theology of salvation is a soteriology. Three of the articles in this issue are theology in this sense. Phil Duncan questions a particular theology of manhood. Joe Morgan-Smith and Glenn Butner investigate important aspects of soteriology.

Still another use of “theology” is to prefix the word with a designation for those people whom the theology seeks to serve (such as feminist theology) or the aim which the theology seeks to achieve (such as liberation theology). In this issue of Priscilla Papers, you will encounter the phrases “feminist theology,” “womanist theology,” and “mujerista theology,” which are attentive to the needs and perspectives of women, African American women, and Latinas, respectively. The article by Valerie Geer, which won second place in CBE’s 2016 Student Paper Competition and thus was read at CBE’s Johannesburg conference in September, expresses a theology concerned for victims and survivors of sex trafficking.

Anselm, an eleventh-century Benedictine monk and Archbishop of Canterbury, gave us the most famous, most concise, and perhaps most helpful definition of theology: “Faith seeking understanding.” Our hope is that these articles spur you on in that quest.

As I conclude this introduction, I should also call attention to the list of Peer Reviewers directly below this column of text.

Recently added to the list is Dr. Marion Taylor, Professor of Old Testament at Wycliffe College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

In addition to Old Testament studies, she is also an expert in nineteenth-century woman theologians. I have been privileged to be able to express gratitude in person to four of our Peer Reviewers this week. Here I thank them all in writing, for Dr. Taylor and the rest of the Peer Review Team have volunteered their time and expertise to do important work in the service of Priscilla Papers and its readers.

DISCLAIMER: Final selection of all material published by CBE in Priscilla Papers is entirely up to the discretion of the publisher, editor, and peer reviewers. Please note that each author is solely legally responsible for the content and the accuracy of facts, citations, references, and quotations rendered and properly attributed in the article appearing under his or her name. Neither Christians for Biblical Equality, nor the editor, nor the editorial team is responsible or legally liable for any content or any statements made by any author, but the legal responsibility is solely that author’s once an article appears in print in Priscilla Papers.

Editor • Jeff Miller Associate Editor / Graphic Designer • Theresa Garbe President / Publisher • Mimi Haddad President Emerita • Catherine Clark Kroeger† Consulting Editor • William David Spencer On the Cover • Martin Luther

Peer Review Team: Lynn H. Cohick, Havilah Dharamraj, Tim Foster, Susan Howell, Jamin Hübner, Loretta Hunnicutt, Adam Omelianchuk, Chuck Pitts, Marion Taylor

Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Priscilla Papers (issn 0898-753x) is published quarterly by Christians for Biblical Equality, © 2017.

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Nurturing Voyeurism, Vibrant Sexism, and Violence: Why We Can’t (Yet) Afford to Forget about Wild at Heart1 Philip T. Duncan I have long deliberated the possible efficacy of another Wild at Heart critique. Although many excellent critiques arose in the years after the book’s initial release in 2001,2 it still sells unusually well, progressively working its way into churches, homes, and minds. The English language version has sold over 4.5 million copies,3 annual sales exceed 100,000,4 and it currently holds the #1 Best Seller spot in Christian Men’s Issues on Amazon.5 To date, the book has been translated into thirty languages.

Beyond this, the ideologies of Wild at Heart find expression in subsequent books written by John and Stasi Eldredge, most notably Captivating,6 as well as numerous contemporary Christian works on sex and gender that display direct influence from the Eldredges’ teachings or promote similar ideas.7 Hardly a year passes without some popular Christian book on gender or parenting acknowledging the Eldredges and their teachings or listing Wild at Heart as recommended reading.8 Stephen Mansfield, for example, calls the book “masterful,” listing it first in “The Ten Essential Books for Manly Men,” because it provides men with “the tools for understanding and living out the essential passions of manhood.”9 For Eldredge himself, such steady reception confirms its timeless truth. It is somehow paradoxically “truer” than before, because “it rings eternal, and universal. God was in it then; he is in it still.”10 Perhaps, then, the unremitting popularity of the book despite multiple well-argued criticisms urges us to address its “theological and cultural vices”11 anew. Detractors may be tired of talking about Wild at Heart, but, nevertheless, the book and its ideas still find favorable reception in the Christian community.

Its sustained influence fifteen years later suggests that there are still valid and pressing reasons for questioning the legitimacy of Eldredge’s version of masculinity. This task is also important because Wild at Heart is not really new or unique. It is a standardbearer in a particular and recent (though durative) “movement”12 of Christian masculinity that draws from a complex nexus of cultural norms whose roots extend back into the early modern period. The sheer ubiquity of these ideologies can hinder critical evaluation, since their prevalence sometimes is taken as evidence for universality. The book’s success exacerbates the problem because it puts a Christian stamp on counter-biblical popular ideologies about gender that have debilitating consequences both in and out of the body of Christ.

Below I outline newly refined perspectives on ways that Eldredge recapitulates conventional gender ideologies. The narrative I develop builds upon past critiques, especially Smith and Mulder (2004) and Camery-Hoggatt and Munn (2005).

I orient toward a few interrelated aspects promoted by Wild at Heart—voyeurism and sexual exploitation, consumerism, and violence toward women—to more explicitly detail potential interdiscursivity and enculturation. Ultimately, while there are many problematic issues in Eldredge’s book, I focus on sexism and false conceptualizations of gender because they are dangerous (and not in the sense of “dangerous” that Eldredge praises), and they continue to be propagated in the Christian world.

A Beauty to Rescue, or a Damsel in Distress? Engendering Objectification Feminist scholars and activists have repeatedly chosen media as a point of critique. This is because literary works, movies, TV shows, and video games commonly perpetuate sexism through their portrayal of stereotypical gender roles, such as the “damsel in distress.” This popular trope extends over centuries of literary use, centering on a weak and helpless (often intellectually incapacitated) woman who is in dire need of rescue by a male protagonist. One of the three core “desires” that Eldredge attributes to all men is “a beauty to rescue;” likewise, he attributes to women a “desire” to be “pursued.” In this way, Eldredge’s gender ideologies are a form of the damsel in distress trope, and he frequently supports his views by making recourse to pop culture archetypes of masculinity built on this theme. In his depiction of gendered souls, then, Eldredge participates in particularizing versions of masculinity and femininity that are woven deep into contemporary US and evangelical society.

As a literary device, feminist scholars target this conventional trope because it disempowers and objectifies women, evoking the image that their agency is either severely mitigated or removed completely.13 Its use in popular culture is extensive and persists even today. For example, in 2013, as a reaction to the trope’s continued prevalence, media critic Anita Sarkeesian released a three-part video blog exposing the pervasiveness of the damsel in distress as a narrative tool in modern video games.14 Notably, many games offer an embodied interactional experience where Wild at Heart’s central theses are played out, especially the particularized roles of men and women informed by male aggression and female passivity. The Eldredges’ gender performances in Wild at Heart and Captivating thus mirror resonant themes in video game narratives: men are typically the protagonists, women “share” in or are an instrument for the protagonist’s “quest,” and violence/ aggression is normalized. Possibly in response to initial criticisms, Captivating and materials on the Eldredges’ Ransomed Heart Ministries website now emphasize the “irreplaceable” nature of the female and her role, but this gesture seems akin to “token gestures of pseudo-empowerment” in video games that “don’t really offer any meaningful development to the core of the [damsel in distress] trope.”15 From a Christian perspective, however, one might wonder whether criticizing this trope undercuts the biblical metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ. I do not believe that this is the case for the following reasons. First, on a basic level it should be noted that gender-based metaphors, images, and tropes are not sexist by necessity. Second, Carolyn Osiek raises important points when she notes that misinterpretations of one such “beautiful” passage (Eph 5:22–33) have yielded negative consequences when appropriated to support patriarchy, and that modernday application is problematic.16 In this passage “the text very quickly moves away from marriage to ecclesiology,”17 and I take it that this shift cautions against over application to marriage

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relationships. Gordon Fee also echoes the problems inherent in directly applying the household code in the Ephesians text “to us and our homes.” Since they depend on foreign “cultural givens . . . the structures are ultimately irrelevant.”18 Instead, the point is that Christ’s love fills and informs our relations.

Moreover, the fact that marriage and ecclesiology are in view in Eph 5:22–33 suggests that broader extension to women and men is blatantly inappropriate.

Even if we consider this metaphor in light of a narrative where Christ the “hero” pursues and saves his bride, the church, any potential “disempowerment” at issue does not concern only one gender and thus is not analogous to the damsel in distress trope.

The shift toward ecclesiology in Eph 5 signals an intentional blurring of gender boundaries to show that women and men stand equal together as the “new humanity.”19 The church as bride metaphor thus humbles all of humanity with respect to Christ regarding salvation; this is symmetric concerning gender, entailing mutuality and equality. Alternatively, the damsel in distress trope disempowers women with respect to men, which is inherently asymmetric, entailing subordination and inequality.

Another problem with how the damsel in distress trope is rehearsed in contemporary US culture and in Wild at Heart is the visual objectification of women through portrayals that are often highly sexualized. Perhaps, then, what Eldredge attempts to achieve in Wild at Heart is the liberation of some intrinsically good pursuit that has been hijacked by game designers and other producers of popular culture. That is, perhaps Eldredge wants to alleviate the objectification of women while holding on to something he sees as good in the gendered concept of “a beauty to rescue.” But Eldredge does little to relieve the sexualized objectification of women in his employment of the damsel in distress trope; instead, he contributes to it. For example, one of Eldredge’s prototypes of masculinity is James Bond. Female characters in Bond films offer an interesting take on the damsel in distress motif: they are not typically weak and helpless, except in their inability to resist Bond’s powerful attractiveness and seduction. Nevertheless, they always represent Hollywood standards of feminine beauty, and their names are often risqué— even blatantly sexual—double entendres like “Pussy Galore,” “Octopussy,” “Plenty O’Toole,” “Xenia Onatopp,” “Fiona Volpe” (Italian for “fox”), and “Holly Goodhead” (some of which have video game counterparts). Rather than representing biblical masculinity, Bond is a caricature of “phallic masculinity”20 replete with gender stereotypes and the sexual exploitation of disempowered women. Wild at Heart’s rigid complementarity effectively attempts to naturalize the damsel in distress cliché— men need to be a “hero” and women need to be “rescued”— proof texting from pop culture rather than offering a countercultural paradigm.

Sanctioned Voyeurism and Sexual Exploitation Eldredge’s idolization of Bond and Indiana Jones as among those exemplifying the masculine ideal is problematic because it promotes the objectification of women, in part, through a culture of voyeurism and sexual exploitation. Moreover, Eldredge’s failure to separate his version of masculinity from such sexualized representations—indeed his very alliance 4 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017

with them—is telling. The male desire for “a beauty to rescue,” coupled with the superficial Hollywood-style nature of “beauty” in Wild at Heart and the attribution of “goodness” to certain male sexual behaviors, all within a Christian context, together engender a sanctioned voyeuristic mentality.

Eldredge’s use of “beauty” is often ambiguous, but when he is explicit the descriptions are sensual and visual.21 His “beauty” is “young with a youth that seems eternal;” she has “flowing hair . . . deep eyes . . . luscious lips” and “a sculpted figure.”22 Implicit, therefore, in Eldredge’s take on “beauty” is an exaltation of the physical, and the presence of this in a book as influential as Eldredge’s is further dangerous because of the function of female sexuality it constructs. Recently, Everest Bryce has drawn from Eldredge’s (mis)interpretation of the OT book of Ruth to argue that a woman’s beauty and sensuality can and should aid in effecting masculinity, because a woman “waits and yearns to give of herself.”23 Accordingly: How does a good woman help her man to play the man? John Eldredge answers the question spot on, “She can use all she is as a woman to get him to use all he’s got as a man. She can arouse, inspire, energize . . . seduce him.” . . . He goes on to say, “She wants to be swept up into an adventure with him.” The irony is that as soon as she captures him and marries him, too often her wounds and fears take over, and she tries to tame him. If she is successful, they both lose.24 Bryce’s take on Wild at Heart’s gendered roles treats the female body in part as a resource, and the boundedness he imposes on femininity aligns with Eldredge’s rigid male-female stereotypes.

Thus, effect-valued beauty has a purpose, but to a point—it is meant to be noticed, but the effect is negative if it degrades the “wild.” Wildness is viewed as part of the infinite spirit of men and women, and God “shares a special closeness”25 with those who are wild.

Women are thus encouraged to exploit their beauty to “arouse” the passions of men. Again referencing Wild at Heart, Bryce praises Ruth for “crawl[ing] into bed with a man she knew had too much to drink, seduc[ing] him with her beauty and brash.” Such behaviors should be lauded, because, as John and Stasi Eldredge maintain, “God holds it up for all women to follow when he not only gives Ruth her own book in the Bible but also names her in the genealogy” of Christ (Matt 1:5, emphasis added).26 John Eldredge even asserts that Bathsheba’s not being mentioned by name in Matthew’s record “tells . . . of God’s disappointment with her, and his delight in . . . Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth.”27 Apparently, what Eldredge deems “biblical femininity” involves using one’s body for sexual advantage because this is “wild” rather than “safe.” It also involves God’s denouncing women like Bathsheba who were targeted for sex without their consent. The conclusion to be drawn here is that, in the logic of Wild at Heart, God delights in David for his voyeurism and Ruth for her (supposed28) seductive prowess, but disapproves of Bathsheba simply because she was sexually assaulted.

What Eldredge and Bryce crucially fail to acknowledge is that descriptive accounts of biblical persons and events should be interpreted according to context and genre, and including does not equal condoning. The presence of Ruth, Tamar, and David in

Jesus’s genealogy displays God’s lavish grace, not a template for gender and sexuality. Eldredge’s masculinity thus falls well short of redeeming sexism in secular culture, and instead provides a Christianized version of a dehumanizing trend where women’s bodies are resources for discovery, exploration, and exploitation.

Consumerism: Women as Commodities Wild at Heart promotes a related problem regarding masculine desires: consumerism. By “consumerism,” I have in mind “a particular interpretation of ‘getting,’ and one that treats the goods and resources of creation as things that exist for my interests and happiness.”29 It entails “a tendency to reduce everything . . . to a commodity able to be exchanged.”30 Additionally important for a consumerist mentality is the transformation of dissatisfaction into something pleasurably addicting, “the satisfying nature of dissatisfaction,”31 and this feeds into a desire to consume perpetually. Moreover, in consumerism, this temperament is wed to a “detachment” that keeps “desire on the move.”32 Throughout Wild at Heart, Eldredge encourages men to treat women as commodities “out there” for consumption. Specifically, he encourages men to relate to women in a way that first objectifies them as a “good” (“a beauty to rescue”) and then values their importance in an egocentric and discriminatory way, prioritizing men’s “needs.” These needs center on the Eldredges’ gendered desires, which they promote as biblical ideals. Since men are said to have a deep-seated need for “an adventure to have,” women are portrayed as satisfying an additional need: companionship for the man’s adventure. How serendipitous it is for Eldredge that he has also discovered complementary aspects of women’s “souls”!

They innately yearn to be rescued, “wanted,” and “pursued”; they want to “unveil” their beauty, and, while some women may want to wrongly “control” their own adventure, all women want “an adventure to share.”33 Effectively, then, women are, in Eldredge’s framework, commodities that primarily exist for the happiness of men. Similarly, Camery-Hoggatt and Munn note that Eldredge portrays women as a mere “conjugal prop,” since “a woman’s capabilities are evaluated strictly according to their effect upon her mate.”34 Interestingly, William Cavanaugh relates the emergence of this new consumerism to the ideologies and practices of the Industrial Revolution, when mass marketing helped generate mass consumption. His observation is instructive because it may help determine the trajectory of how women were (re) conceptualized in the modern period, including the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. In line with this, Carolyn Merchant argues in The Death of Nature that the Scientific Revolution engendered a mechanistic view of nature and women, which encouraged the subjugation and domination of both. Her book examines the implications of these ideologies for the present, showing that early modern representations of women still find expression today. Wild at Heart in particular draws from ideologies deeply rooted in the philosophies of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Throughout Wild at Heart, women are mechanistically viewed as resources available for male exploration and exploitation as part and parcel of their “adventures” and “battles.”

Eldredge’s take on pornography and his archetypal masculine heroes further illustrate a consumeristic attitude toward women.

He identifies at some level the “good” desire for a beauty to

rescue and fight for as motivating men’s engagement in viewing pornography; a man “longs for the woman” but does not realize that he needs to “fight” for her.35 The problem with pornography, according to Eldredge, is that it does not “require” anything of a man.36 Michael John Cusick agrees with this assessment in his 2012 book Surfing for God, noting that pornography “allows us to have our cake (‘I feel strong and masculine’) and eat it too (no strength or masculinity required).”37 Significantly, for Eldredge this lacking of “requirement” is a “weak” and “passive” characteristic that he feels is present in “emasculated” and “feminized” men.

Eldredge fails to take into account that his narrative actually supports a consumerist detachment and alienation that pornography exploits for its perpetuation and consumption.

Pornography does “require” something from men (and women) who view it—it requires a consumeristic pursuit of the commodified, sexualized object. Moreover, it evidences an attitude of “disposability” that “consumerism lives off.”38 The desire for “a beauty to rescue” (especially if blended with the need for constant adventure) betrays the deep association between dissatisfaction and satisfaction that is emblematic of the new consumerism. As Eldredge’s heroes Indiana Jones and James Bond ceaselessly demonstrate in their movies, “a beauty to rescue” is not about one beauty but rather an indefinite amount of beauties to capture and discard in an endless quest for sexual expression, control, and exploitation. Appealing to Indiana Jones and James Bond further illustrates the disposability of women as female objects that have been commodified. Thus, men engaging in viewing pornography are not necessarily “passive;” they are active participants deeply involved in the logic of consumerism that feeds on the need to pursue adventuresome dissatisfaction in detached relationships.39 Oddly, this logic forms the backbone of Wild at Heart.

Violence toward Women Many critics of Wild at Heart note Eldredge’s infatuation with an incitement to violence. This is perhaps most obviously manifested in his constant attention to figures like Braveheart’s William Wallace and The Gladiator’s Maximus.40 Eldredge even recounts (imagines?) God praising him for a job well done during a conference tour by speaking personally to Eldredge, likening him to Henry V and “the man in the arena, whose face is covered with blood and sweat and dust, who strove valiantly . . . a great warrior . . . yes, even Maximus.”41 Such palpable references to violent figures only make sense in his overall narrative, which articulates “power” and “aggression” as intrinsically masculine.

For Eldredge, these are characteristically male by virtue of God’s intent in creation: “aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it,” and “every man needs to know that he is powerful.”42 Sometimes Eldredge suggests bounded aggression, noting that this “design” can “have a dark turn, as it has with inner-city gangs,”43 but his allusions to wrongful expressions of power are so cliché and vague that they are meaningless.

When one considers the archetypes of masculinity that are unabashedly glorified in Wild at Heart, Eldredge’s attempts at hedging seem strangely contradictory.44 It does not take much imagination to envision how divinely ordained male aggression could be appropriated to support Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 5

violent acts. Sadly, one does not need to explore the imaginary realm to find an example of this. In 2009, authorities learned that one of the most deadly drug cartels in Mexico, La Familia Michoacán, distributed copies of the Spanish translation of Wild at Heart (Salvaje de Corazón) as reading material for cartel members. Eldredge officially condemned the cartel’s violent acts and distanced himself and his teachings from the practices of La Familia. His reaction was not unlike his response to critiques of his book: he positions himself as a Jesus figure whose teachings have been abused and misappropriated.45 I believe Eldredge’s denouncement of La Familia and their application of Wild at Heart is wholly genuine. However, Eldredge is displaying a degree of naïveté by dismissing the strong parallels between his teachings and ideologies that are used to justify horrendous acts of violence and aggression. This could relate to Eldredge seeing his ideas closely aligned with biblical truth, so much so that it is as if his own interpretations are scriptural paraphrases. Eldredge explains, “People have used the Bible to justify a lot of evil actions. . . . It brings me sorrow and anger to know that they are doing this, and I renounce their use of my words in this way.”46 Apart from the general exaltation of violence in Wild at Heart, the potential for violence toward women is highly problematic.

Given that historically and globally, even today, women are disproportionate recipients of violent acts,47 addressing this issue is paramount. It is tragically incongruous that Eldredge decries the antagonist of Braveheart, Edward the Longshanks, by noting his being a “ruthless oppressor . . . raping her [Scotland’s] daughters.”48 At the heart of violent acts toward women lie ideologies that make women sexualized objects to be aggressively pursued and captured (“rescued”). And at the heart of these horrendous acts lie ideologies that appeal to men’s “needs” that Wild at Heart endorses unequivocally: the need for power, a “beauty,” and an adventure. Eldredge even appeals to games and video games “where bloodshed is a prerequisite for fun” as evidence for the “fierce” and “warrior”-like “universal nature” of boys and men right before advocating that a man needing to be “fierce” is “especially true in . . . relationships.”49 What will happen when men, drunk on Eldredge’s fictional masculinized power, realize that they can, under divine sanction, combine the need for power, aggression, a beauty to rescue, and risk-taking adventure in their relationships with women? After all, “a boy wants to attack something—and so does a man.”50 I am not claiming that Eldredge overtly condones violence toward women. However, normalization of violence, commodification of women, and emplotment devices such as the damsel in distress trope are dangerous because they contribute to sexism and pervasive violence against women.51 The church cannot afford for these images of masculinized power over women to be branded as biblical, especially since violence against women remains an insidious problem in Christian contexts.52 Moreover, since Eldredge recapitulates patriarchal ideologies salient in pop culture, media, and the church, and naturalizes both the disempowerment of women and male aggression, we must take into account the risk of intertextual linkages with resurgent expressions of these themes elsewhere (e.g., media and video games that promote male-hero fantasies incentivized by violence toward women).53

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Conclusion Wild at Heart opens with a request for “permission.” However, it is not permission to be men in the imago Dei that Eldredge ultimately advocates; it is permission to be “men” as construed in misguided visions of hyper-masculinity in American culture.

Though Eldredge claims to develop a radical, counter-cultural, biblical view of masculinity, he instead propagates “normative beliefs about males”: “that boys and men should be tougher, more aggressive and violent, more assertive, less caring and nurturing and sexually more assertive and voracious than women.”54 In Wild at Heart we find a space in which sexism and male dominance are not only vibrant, they are nurtured. The pervasive dual-sexism in Wild at Heart draws from complex cultural norms recapitulating modernist ideals about gender and perpetuating consumeristic attitudes toward women.

Eldredge interprets the book’s success as evidence that “God is in” the work. But Eldredge is simply repackaging popular tropes and ideologies, drawing from “pervasive and allusive” stereotypes and “tapping deep into collective fantasies.”55 It is alliance with cultural norms and stereotypes that fuels the book’s popularity, providing a false sense of divinely-ordained universality. The book indexes and participates in systemic and institutional sexism and male dominance, the consequences of sin (Gen 3:16) that Christians are called to resist.

Eldredge’s ideas are dangerous. They are dangerous because they are misleading in the way they appeal to biblical authority.

They are dangerous because they promote sexist ideologies and male dominance that inform subjugation of and violent acts toward women. They are dangerous because they continue to exert substantial influence within the church. Revisiting Wild at Heart may continue to open up avenues for investigating how certain conceptualizations of gender may be detrimental to the social fabric of the body of Christ.

Notes 1. This essay blossomed out of many conversations. Many thanks to my wife, Monica Duncan, and to friends whose discussions helped shape this essay—especially Jon Huffmaster, Cameron Bernard, and Taylor Scott.

2. E.g., Vincent Bacote, “Battle Cry” [posted Nov 1, 2003], available from Christianity Today at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/ november/34.84.html; Randy Stinson, “Is God Wild at Heart?,” Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 8, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 56–58; Ruth Etheridge III, “God in Man’s Image”; available at http://www. churchofthegoodshepherd.info/WAHcritique.html; James K. A. Smith and Mark Mulder, “Are Men Really Wild at Heart?” [posted Oct 2004], available from “Perspectives” at http://www.rca.org/page.aspx?pid=3382; Brynn Camery-Hoggatt and Nealson Munn, “Wild at Heart: Essential Reading or ‘Junk Food for the Soul’?,” Priscilla Papers 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 24.

3. As of October 2016. Approximately 2 million copies sold in the first four years, and another 2.5+ million after. This 4.5+ million figure includes hard cover and trade paperback versions of the book (original and revised). It excludes ancillary products, such as Wild at Heart Field Manual (2002), Wild at Heart Journal (2003), Wild at Heart Facilitator’s Guide (2004), Wild at Heart: A Band of Brothers Small Group Participant Guide (2009), Wild at Heart Video Discussions (2009), Wild at Heart Advanced DVD (2012), or the various CDs that comprise Wild at Heart Boot Camp: The Platinum Collection - Compact Disc (2011).

4. To put this number into perspective, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sells 100,000 copies annually.

5. Confirmed in both July 2015 and Oct 2016. Similarly, in Oct 2016, the Kindle version of Wild at Heart was ranked first in Kindle Store for Men’s Christian Living.

6. The popular follow-up to Wild at Heart offering insight into a “woman’s soul,” Captivating, sold more than 1 million within the first year of its release in 2005 (rev. ed., 2010). Additional books with either Stasi or John as sole author or co-author building on Wild at Heart include: The Way of the Wild Heart: A Map for the Masculine Journey by John Eldredge (2006), The Way of the Wild Heart Manual: A Personal Map for Your Masculine Journey by Craig McConnell and John Eldredge (2006), Love & War: Finding the Marriage You’ve Dreamed of by John and Stasi Eldredge (2009), Becoming Myself: Embracing God’s Dream of You by Stasi Eldredge (2013), Killing Lions: A Guide Through the Trials Young Men Face by John Eldredge and Sam Eldredge (2014), and Free to Be Me: Becoming The Young Woman God Created You to Be by Stasi Eldredge (2014).

7. E.g., John Sowers, The Heroic Path: In Search of the Masculine Heart (New York: Hachette, 2014); Jim Snyder, Resurrection of Your Inner Hero: Rendering Passivity Obsolete (Bloomington: WestBow, 2014); Stephen Mansfield, Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2013); James C. Dobson, Dads and Daughters (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 2013); Everest Bryce, Drop the Fig Leaf: Dropping Barriers to Freedom for Men and Women (Bloomington: WestBow, 2013); Rebecca Merz, Love at First Sight: Stepping Out on a Maybe (Bloomington: WestBow, 2013); Michael John Cusick, Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012); James C. Dobson, Bringing Up Girls (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 2010); Stephen James and David S. Thomas, Wild Things: The Art of Nurturing Boys (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 2009); Walt Larimore and Barb Larimore, His Brain, Her Brain: How Divinely Designed Differences Can Strengthen Your Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009); Robert S. Paul and Donna K. Wallace, Finding Ever After: A Romantic Adventure for Her, an Adventurous Romance for Him (Bloomington: Bethany House, 2008); Jill Rigby, Raising Respectful Children in a Disrespectful World (New York: Howard, 2006).

8. As an extreme example, the anti-Islamic group “Understanding the Threat” lists it among its recommended reading, saying, “Before we can change America, change begins in each of us, especially men. American men must stand in the authority in which they are born and lead. As spiritual heads of the household and defenders of our faith and nation, men must courageously step up to the plate now. There is a great war raging and we need all warriors on deck. Wild at Heart clearly lays out the core desires with which every man is born. This is a must read for any man who wants to join this fight” (https://www.understandingthethreat. com/research/).

9. Mansfield, Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men, 265.

10. John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), xii.

11. Vincent Bacote, “Battle Cry” [posted Nov 1, 2003], available from Christianity Today at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/ november/34.84.html.

12. Brandon O’Brien, “A Jesus for Real Men: What the Masculinity Movement Gets Right and Wrong” [posted Apr 18, 2008], available from Christianity Today at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/ april/27.48.html.

13. I use the phrase “evoking the image” with respect to loss of agency because, in reality, authors do not have the actual power to mitigate or remove women’s agency.

14. Anita Sarkeesian, “Damsel in Distress (part 1): Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” [posted Mar 7, 2013], available from Feminist Frequency at http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/03/damsel-in-distress-part-1.

15. Anita Sarkeesian, “Damsel in Distress (part 2): Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” [posted May 28, 2013], available from Feminist Frequency at http://feministfrequency.com/2013/05/28/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropesvs-women .

16. Carolyn Osiek, “The Bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:22–33): A Problematic Wedding,” BTB 32, no. 1 (Feb 2002): 29–39.

17. Osiek, “The Bride of Christ,” 32.

18. Gordon D. Fee, “The Cultural Context of Ephesians 5:18–6:9,” Priscilla Papers 16, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 8. See also Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul’s Letters (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 271–90.

19. Timothy G. Gombis, “A Radically New Humanity: The Function of the Haustafel in Ephesians,” JETS 48, no. 2 (June 2005): 325.

20. Lisa Funnell, “Negotiating Shifts in Feminism: The ‘Bad’ Girls of James Bond,” in Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture, ed. M. Waters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 199.

21. Visual representations of women on Ransomed Heart Ministry’s website (as of July 10, 2015) provide further support for the Eldredge’s view of beauty as sensuality.

22. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 180.

23. Bryce, Drop the Fig Leaf, 73.

24. Bryce, Drop the Fig Leaf, 64.

25. Bryce, Drop the Fig Leaf, 65.

26. Bryce, Drop the Fig Leaf, 65; Eldredge and Eldredge, Captivating, 157. Everest also praises David for his divinely approved wildness, noting that he was “an adulterer, conspirator, and murder” (Bryce, Drop the Fig Leaf, 65).

27. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, rev. ed., 192.

28. While the scene at Boaz’s threshing floor may have sexual overtones, Ruth’s aims are not necessarily primarily sexual in nature (Robert L. Hubbard, The Book of Ruth [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988], 203–12). Uncovering Boaz’s feet and asking him to “spread [his] wings” over Ruth is symbolic of her taking “refuge” under God’s “wings” since Boaz is her kinsman-redeemer (Ruth 2:12, 3:9).

29. James K. A. Smith, The Devil Reads Derrida: Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 40.

30. William T. Cavanaugh, “When Enough Is Enough: Why God’s Abundant Life Won’t Fit in a Shopping Cart, and Other Mysteries of Consumerism” [posted May 2005], available from Sojourners at http:// sojo.net/magazine/2005/05/when-enough-enough.

31. Cavanaugh, “When Enough Is Enough.”

32. Cavanaugh, “When Enough Is Enough.”

33. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 16, 51, emphasis original.

34. Camery-Hoggatt and Munn, “Wild at Heart: Essential Reading or ‘Junk Food for the Soul’?,” 26.

35. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 44.

36. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 44, 187.

37. Cusick, Surfing for God, 17.

38. Smith, The Devil Reads Derrida, 41.

39. Eldredge explains “the sinister nature of pornography” as stemming from a man “using” a woman in order to “be energized by a woman” (Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 187). This is problematic for him because, in such a case, the man is trying to get masculinity from something outside himself (i.e., a woman). Therefore, Eldredge’s solution is that men look internally toward their nature (since Eldredge prioritizes gender in how humanity images God), even though elsewhere he claims that masculinity is an “essence” that has to be “bestowed” (Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 62). However, as I and others have noted, Eldredge’s very premises are questionable, which leads me to reject his simplistic treatment of pornography as well as his inability to recognize how his teachings are complicit in the visual objectification of women.

40. Following Smith and Mulder, Eldredge’s account actually de-masculinizes Jesus and is radically un-counter-cultural, since it

Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 7

unabashedly exalts Hollywood caricatures like William Wallace in Braveheart and Maximus in Gladiator as the archetypes of masculinity.

Camery-Hoggatt and Munn additionally reveal the irony inherent in Eldredge’s exaltation of “masculine” pop icons by noting God’s reversal of such practice in his act of choosing “the psalmist David” over “musclebound Goliath.”

41. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 135.

42. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 10–11, emphasis original.

43. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 11.

44. In fairness, Eldredge sees violence as “a cover-up for fear” (Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 56). But this is at odds with the implicit (and, at times, explicit) condoning of violent behavior in Wild at Heart.

Essentially, violence ends up being permissible if enacted under the guise of “every man’s” three desires (a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue).

45. Douglas LeBlanc, “Too Wild at Heart?” [posted Aug 1, 2004], available from Christianity Today at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ ct/2004/august/15.34.html; Trevor Persaud, “Eldredge Denounces Drug Cartel” [posted June 29, 2010], available from Christianity Today at http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2010/06/john_ eldredge_s.html.

46. Persaud, “Eldredge Denounces Drug Cartel,” emphasis mine.

Eldredge closes the introduction to Wild at Heart’s revised edition with two quotations that together illustrate this point. First, he cites Teddy Roosevelt, who notes that “It is not the critic who counts.” This is immediately followed by Jesus’s words in Matt 11:12: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.” It appears that Eldredge here aims at his critics, and, if so, this again perspectivizes his claim that his teachings are biblical.

8 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017

47. See, for example, Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

48. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 22.

49. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, rev. ed., 11.

50. Eldredge, Wild at Heart, rev. ed., 11.

51. Statistics about violence against women are ever-changing. See The United Nations’ report, “The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics,” the most recent version of which is 2015 (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ gender/worldswomen.html).

52. J. Alsdurf and P. Alsdurf, Battered into Submission: The Tragedy of Wife Abuse in the Christian Home (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1998); Andy J. Johnson, Religion and Men’s Violence against Women (New York: Springer, 2015).

53. Sarkeesian, “Damsel in Distress,” pt. 2.

54. David Benatar, The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 85.

55. Robert H. Woods Jr. and Paul D. Patton, Prophetically Incorrect: A Christian Introduction to Media Criticism (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 59.

PHIL DUNCAN holds master’s degrees in both indigenous studies and linguistics and is working on his PhD in linguistics at the University of Kansas.

Along with his wife Monica and their children, Phil attends Grace Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Kansas.

Incarnational Friendship: A Feminist- and Womanist-Inspired Revision of Luther’s “Happy Exchange” Theory of Atonement Joseph Morgan-Smith St. Luke tells us that the women who followed Jesus to the cross “were beating their breasts and wailing for him” (Luke 23:27 NRSV). Some feminist and womanist1 theologians still wail at the sight of the cross—they reject traditional theories of atonement that regard the torture and death of an innocent man as a good intended by God. Many feminists and womanists find God’s saving activity hidden beneath this senseless and tragic brutality. Our goal in the present article is to analyze what feminist and womanist theologians have to say about the cross of Jesus, and from this, to examine our understanding of God’s saving activity in light of their helpful critique.

To begin, we will listen to feminist and womanist theologians who preclude any salvific efficacy of the cross whatsoever.

Their voices are not necessarily representative of feminist and womanist theology as a whole; other feminist and womanist theologians embrace the cross as redemptive. But it is worth hearing critiques of atonement in their most radical form. When feminists and womanists do develop theologies of the cross, they do so in various ways, of course, but around consistent themes, which we will consider in the second part of the essay.

Then finally, we will re-examine Martin Luther’s “happy exchange”2 theory of atonement to see whether it can address both the feminist and womanist critiques and account for the gravity of sin and the salvific efficacy of the cross. That is, we will ask whether Luther can provide a resource for feminist and womanist theology, only after allowing feminist and womanist concerns to apply Luther’s doctrine in ways Luther himself would never have considered.3 Rejecting Atonement In their now famous essay, “For God So Loved the World?,” Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker contend that connecting the crucifixion of Jesus in any way with human salvation makes God “a divine sadist and a divine child abuser,” whose “abuse is paraded as salvific and the child who suffers ‘without even raising a voice’ is lauded as the hope of the world.”4 They argue further that atonement theology perpetuates continued abuse and victimization. Picking up on this argument, Rita Nakashima Brock notes atonement theory’s dependence on patriarchal images: “The shadow of the punitive father must always lurk behind atonement. He haunts images of forgiving grace.”5 Delores Williams levels a similar critique, drawing on black women’s unique experience of surrogacy. Williams resonates with the biblical story of Hagar, who, when her slave holders Abram and Sarai could not produce a child of their own, was forced to bear Abram’s child in Sarai’s place (Gen 16). Later, when Sarai (now Sarah) was miraculously able to conceive, Hagar and her son were cast out of the home. “Because she was a slave,” Williams writes in Sisters in the Wilderness, “[Hagar’s] body, like her labor, could be exploited in any way her owners desired.

Her reproduction capacities belonged to her slave holders.”6

Surrogacy, like that forced upon Hagar, has been a feature of African American women’s experience as well, in different capacities throughout American history. In the antebellum period black female slaves were often coerced to act as surrogates for their slave-owners’ wives: ignoring their own children to nurture hers, filling in for her in governing the household, even acting as the slave-owner’s lover, freeing the slave-owner’s wife to live up to the sexless ideal for women of that period. After emancipation, when such coerced surrogacy was no longer upheld by laws protecting slave-owners’ rights to their property, social pressures continued to influence black women to fulfill “voluntary” surrogacy roles.7 Attending to black women’s historic experience of surrogacy raises questions about how we understand the significance of Jesus’s cross. If “Jesus died on the cross in place of humans, thereby taking human sin upon himself,” Williams writes, then “Jesus represents the ultimate surrogate figure; he stands in the place of someone else: sinful humankind.”8 So part of Williams’s aim in Sisters in the Wilderness is to raise the question “whether the image of a surrogate-God has salvific power for black women, or whether this image supports and reinforces the exploitation that has accompanied their experience with surrogacy.”9 For Williams the answer is clearly the latter. For one, “there is the issue of the part God the Father played in determining the surrogate role filled by Jesus, the Son.” If Jesus is a surrogate, is God a white slave-owner?10 Black women simply cannot worship that kind of a God. Neither do they want anything to do with salvation that relies on someone’s having to act as a surrogate: “Salvation does not depend upon any form of surrogacy made sacred by traditional and orthodox understanding of Jesus’ life and death.”11 Further, this theology of the cross assumes that Jesus died for the sake of sinners, but, as JoAnne Marie Terrell, commenting on Williams’s argument, points out, “the slaves would have no need for justification of this kind, in light of their innocence and the empirical evidence of their oppression by whites.”12 How then, in the cross, can we find good news for those who have been sinned against? This is an important question to which we will return at the end of the essay.

Moreover, for Williams and for Brown and Parker, our theories of atonement glorify the cruel and unjust suffering of Jesus, held up as an example to be imitated. Speaking in the context of sexual and domestic violence, Brown and Parker believe this type of oppression has been sustained by the fact that many women have been convinced their suffering is justified.13 And it is “this fundamental tenet of Christianity” that Christ suffered and died for us that “upholds actions and attitudes that accept, glorify, and even encourage suffering.”14 If Jesus is said to have given his life for us, then, Brown and Parker say, it seems clear “we should likewise sacrifice ourselves. Any sense that we have a right to care for our own needs is in conflict with being a follower of Jesus. Our suffering for others will save the world.”15 Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 9

The woman who internalizes this theology can get trapped in a cycle of abuse: When redemptive suffering is held before her in the image of Jesus on the cross, she feels herself urged to suffer for the sake of others. She willingly endures abuse and pain, believing it will bring about the salvation of others. She sees it as her role “to suffer in the place of others, as Jesus suffered for us all.”16 Pushed to its most twisted extreme, this theology incites battered women “to be more concerned about their victimizer than about themselves.”17 If the image of Jesus on a cross perpetuates violence against women, the image of a “loving father” carrying out the suffering and death of “his” own son sustains a different kind of abuse.

“When parents have an image of a God righteously demanding the total obedience of ‘his’ son—even obedience to death—what will prevent the parent from engaging in divinely sanctioned child abuse?”18 Further, this image has left us with little resources for victims of abuse. What could a theology that identifies love with suffering possibly say to a child having to navigate the inner conflict between a parent’s professed love and the suffering that same parent forces upon her?19 Similarly, Williams argues that “surrogacy, attached to this divine personage, thus takes on the aura of the sacred.”20 If black women accept the idea that the world is redeemed by Jesus’s acting as a surrogate, she asks, “can they not also passively accept the exploitation that surrogacy brings?”21 Instead, she says, womanist theologians must reject a theology of the cross if they are to show black women “that God did not intend the surrogacy roles they have been forced to perform. God did not intend the defilement of their bodies as white men put them in the place of white women to provide sexual pleasure for white men during the slavocracy.”22 The highly controversial “Re-imagining” conference, held in November 1993 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was part of the World Council of Churches’ “Decade of Solidarity with Women.” After the conference, critics released to congregations of denominations supporting the conference a document listing what they took to be highly provocative statements by the conference speakers. Among these was Williams’s reply to a direct question about her theory of atonement: “I don’t think we need an atonement theory at all. . . . I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.”23 In Sisters in the Wilderness she states even more directly: “There is nothing divine in the blood of the cross.”24 In place of atonement, Williams advocates what she calls the “ministerial vision” of Jesus. “Jesus did not come to redeem humans by showing them God’s ‘love’ manifested in the death of God’s innocent child on a cross.” Rather “Jesus came to show life—to show redemption through a perfect ministerial vision of righting relations between body (individual and community), mind (of humans and of tradition) and spirit.” Redemption, for Williams, is an invitation “to participate in this ministerial vision of righting relations.” That is to say, redemption is “not something one has to die to reach.” Redemption comes through the “ethical thought and practice upon which to build positive, productive quality of life . . . as prescribed in the sermon on the mount, in the golden rule and in the commandment to show love above all else.”25 For Williams the cross is not properly a part of redemption. Rather, the cross represents “the evil of 10 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017

humankind trying to kill the ministerial vision of life in relation that Jesus brought humanity.”26 Brown and Parker likewise conclude, “no one was saved by the death of Jesus.” Christians have so extensively theorized about the salvific efficacy of the cross, they say, because “Christianity is an abusive theology that glorifies suffering.” Therefore, “if Christianity is to be liberating for the oppressed, it must itself be liberated from theology. We must do away with the atonement.”

But Brown and Parker ask—rightly, I think—“If we throw out the atonement is Christianity left? Can we call our new creation Christianity even with an asterisk?”27 Re-envisioning Atonement Other feminist and womanist theologians, however, emphasize the saving significance of the cross in other ways. Elizabeth Johnson, for instance, says what is revealed in the cross “is not Jesus’ necessary passive victimization divinely decreed as a penalty for sin, but rather a dialectic of disaster and powerful human love through which the gracious God of Jesus enters into solidarity with all those who suffer and are lost.”28 It is “the paradigmatic locus of divine involvement in the pain of the world.”29 Not only does God participate in the suffering of the world through the cross, but for Johnson, God “overcomes, inconceivably, from within through the power of love.”30 We will have more to say about this theme of solidarity later; for now it is sufficient to point out that what is at stake for Johnson in this image is that it challenges the hegemony of patriarchal rule: “The crucified Jesus embodies the exact opposite of the patriarchal ideal of the powerful man,” and thus exemplifies “the ‘kenosis of patriarchy,’ the self-emptying of male dominating power in favor of the new humanity of compassionate service and mutual empowerment.”31 In this model of divine solidarity, redemption is accomplished through the cross “in a way different from the techniques of dominating violence. The victory of shalom is won not by the sword of the warrior god but by the awesome power of compassionate love, in and through solidarity with those who suffer.” Thus, while Johnson rejects the cross as an image of the passive victimization of Jesus on behalf of others, she re-appropriates the cross as an image of “heartbreaking empowerment.”32 Likewise, JoAnne Terrell says that while she is “aware of the problematical nature of the language of sacrifice, the potential and actual abuses thereof,”33 she does “not think the problem is with the imagery per se.”34 Rather, she wants “to posit a transformed, sacramental notion of sacrifice that has saving significance for the African American community and for black women in particular.”35 When they theorize about the saving significance of the cross, however, feminist and womanist theologians do not leave behind the radical critique of classic theories of atonement such as we saw in Williams and in Brown and Parker. Rather, they reenvision atonement in light of this critique. Perhaps we can call it atonement with an asterisk. We will examine two themes around which some feminist and womanist theologians re-organize the doctrine of atonement: First, the cross was not intended by God; it was an historical consequence of the life of Jesus in the context in which he lived it. Second, we cannot infer from the cross that God ever intends the suffering of others. Rather, on the cross God suffers in loving solidarity with all who suffer.

The Cross as Historical Consequence Feminist and womanist theologians understand the cross as an historical consequence in two senses: First, the cross is what Kelly Brown Douglas calls “a fait accompli of his ministry.”36 That is, anyone who lived the life Jesus lived, challenging the hegemonic power-structures he challenged, in the context in which he challenged them, would inevitably have suffered a similar fate.

Thus Jesus’s life, Johnson says, “bore the signature of his death.”37 Secondly, feminist and womanist theologians like Johnson and Douglass assert that the violent and oppressive men who crucified Jesus alone bear the responsibility for his death. These emphases controvert any sense that God willed or sanctioned or was in any way party to the crucifixion of Jesus, and thus exonerate God of any culpability for the act.38 The proof of this, Douglas says, is “the fact that God responded to the crucifixion not with approval of this evil attack on the human body, but with the resurrection, a body-affirming act.”39 It is for this reason, Terrell says, that “the cross became the central motif in the liturgies, hymnody and confessional utterances of African Americans”: because the unjust suffering of Jesus provides “tangible parallels to the historical suffering of the community.”40 Terrell’s sacramental notion of sacrifice does not view Jesus as a victim who passively consents to the evil done to him; nor does it view sacrifice as the direct objective of the cross. Rather, it views Jesus’s sacrifice, like that of the martyrs, from a position of great power, “as the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something with higher claim.” That this image “got lost in the rhetorical impetus of the language of surrogacy,” Terrell argues, is an historical accident that does not account for the scandal of the cross: “that something, anything, good could come out of such an event.”41 This historical consequence view of the cross, however, is not without criticism from feminist and womanist theologians. For Brock, a focus on the historical reasons for the cross only delays the question of God’s innocence.

In Christology’s most benignly paternalistic forms, the father, who loves all creation, does not desire to punish us. Instead, the father allows the son to suffer the consequences of the evil created by his wayward creation. The father stands by in passive anguish as his most beloved son is killed because the father refuses to interfere, even though he has the latent power to do so.42 Brown and Parker also critique this understanding of the cross as a kind of victim blaming. To place the reason for the cross upon the kind of life Jesus lived is like saying “Jesus is responsible for his death on the cross,” in the same way some say “a woman who walks alone at night on a deserted street is to blame when she is raped.”43 In principle, Brown and Parker certainly would rather understand the death of Jesus as a consequence of history than the intention of God, but instead of Jesus’s choice to endure or accept this suffering, they want to reframe the discussion around what he refused to relinquish: Redemption happens when people refuse to relinquish respect and concern for others, when people refuse

to relinquish fullness of feeling, when people refuse to give up seeing, experiencing, and being connected and affected by all of life. Lust for life—the insistent zest for experiencing and responding—is what has the power to create community and sustain justice.44 The Suffering of God The second theme around which feminist and womanist theologians develop a vision of the cross is the notion that on the cross God suffers in loving solidarity with all who suffer. Protesting the tendency of a few womanist theologians (I suspect she is thinking particularly of Williams here) to belittle any theology of the cross, Terrell writes: “I believe that Christians need to ponder the implications of Christ’s death continuously, because the drama testifies to the exceedingly great lengths to which God goes to advise the extent of human estrangement. It is no slight on the intelligence of black women when they confess this.”45 This theme of entering into human estrangement becomes important for feminist and womanist understandings of the cross.

Johnson sagely notes how strange it is that the Christian tradition has remained tethered to the Greek philosophical (read patriarchal) conception of an impassible, apathetic God, despite our confession that, in Jesus Christ, God suffered a brutal execution at the hands of violent men.46 How could so powerful an image, rather than actually influencing our perception of God, instead give rise to such unsatisfactory formulations as: Jesus suffers only in his finite human nature, but suffering cannot be predicated of the divine? For Johnson, this is a testimony to the pervasiveness of patriarchal power. For Johnson, as for many other feminist and womanist theologians, there is no question: the cross “is the parable that enacts Sophia-God’s participation in the suffering of the world.”47 Johnson is somewhat wary of extending the image of the suffering God too far. There is a growing trend among modern theologians to find God’s glory in humiliation, God’s power in impotence, to the extent that God is essentially weak. Johnson commends this image “intended by some men theologians,” she supposes, “to challenge the abuse of power within patriarchy so marked by the domination of those in charge.”48 Nevertheless, she warns that the image can be dangerous, particularly when spoken to women. Recalling that all systems of oppression inculcate into the oppressed a feeling of hopelessness, which diminishes the drive to resistance, Johnson argues that divine powerlessness does not liberate the oppressed, but serves only to maintain this sense of despair. She writes, “the ideal of the helpless divine victim serves only to strengthen women’s dependency and potential for victimization, and to subvert initiatives for freedom, when what is needed is growth in relational autonomy and self-affirmation.”

“The antidote” to the macho-man God of classical theism, then, is not “the reverse image of a victimized, helpless one.” Instead, Johnson says, we must “step decisively out of the androcentric system of power-over versus victimization” altogether, and reimagine the categories of power, pain and human experience.49 A deeper criticism of suffering God theology is found, once again, in Brown and Parker. The modern emergence of suffering God theology is, they admit, “theological progress,” but, they argue, it does not liberate those who suffer because it remains hampered by the problem of emulation: It “still produces the Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 11

same answers to the question, How shall I interpret and respond to the suffering that occurs in my life?” The answer is that I am to “patiently endure; suffering will lead to greater life.”50 More pointedly, Brown and Parker call into question the connection between solidarity and redemption. Just like, as Johnson says above, divine solidarity softens the blow of God’s existence in the face of evil but does not provide a theoretical answer to the theodicy question; so also, Brown and Parker say, the notion that God bears the burden of suffering with us may perhaps make suffering more bearable, but “bearing the burden . . . does not take the burden away.”51 Pushing a little further still, Brown and Parker ask: “Do we need the death of God incarnate to show us that God is with us in our sufferings? . . . Was God not with us in our suffering before the death of Jesus? Did the death really initiate something that did not exist before?”52 The Incarnational Friendship Model Brown and Parker’s criticism brings to light a limitation in suffering God theology and in many feminist and womanist constructions of atonement more generally: Feminist and womanist atonement theories have important insight into the nature of God, how God acts (and does not act) in the cross.

They are, however, sometimes reticent to say what is effected by the cross, if they do not reject its efficacy outright. As a result, their positive formulations of the cross sometimes fail to match the vigor of their doctrine of sin—a doctrine with a shift in focus, no doubt, from the traditional forgiveness of the sinner to liberation of the one sinned against, but a vigorous doctrine of sin nonetheless. Could it be that an atonement theory that does not account for the salvific efficacy of the cross cannot deal sufficiently with the gravity of sin? By way of conclusion, then, I would like to re-examine an old theory of atonement, but one that is often left out of the textbook summaries—namely Luther’s happy exchange theory. Historians of atonement theory have given precious little attention to Luther, folding him into the tradition of atonement theories focusing on the satisfaction of God’s wrath, which stem from the eleventh-century Benedictine theologian Anselm.53 I submit that atonement theology generally, and perhaps Protestant versions in particular, need the feminist and womanist critique of atonement. And I submit that feminist and womanist theologians could critically engage an atonement theory like Luther’s—which, as I will argue, can hold the weight of that critique—as a resource for accounting for the gravity of sin in atonement theory and for articulating the salvific efficacy of the cross.

I draw heavily here from Kathryn Tanner and Dianna Thompson, two feminist theologians who, in very different ways, have examined the happy exchange view. Tanner actually argues for an “incarnational model,” but she says that the incarnation is the basic mechanism of atonement in the happy exchange model.54 She argues that adopting the incarnational model would enable us “to revise traditional descriptions and explanations of the saving significance of the cross so as to do justice to all the criticisms that white feminist and womanist theologians level against classical atonement theories.”55 And it would “supplement feminist and womanist theologies,” by “deflecting criticism” that they have rejected the cross altogether.56 12 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017

Luther’s happy exchange model, as laid out in his brief 1519 homily “Two Kinds of Righteousness” and elsewhere, is simply that Christ Jesus himself is present in the act of faith, just as St. Paul prays for the Ephesians “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph 3:17). “Through faith in Christ,” Luther says, Christ himself “becomes ours.” And when Christ becomes ours through faith, “everything which Christ has is ours” as well.57 When the believer is united to Christ through faith, whatever grace, righteousness, life and peace are in Christ become hers; and whatever sin, evil and suffering are in her become Christ’s. Tanner says, “the happy exchange model of the atonement is just a case of the saving communication of idioms that the incarnation brings about.”58 “Understood with reference to the incarnation,” she says, atonement “can no longer be limited to the cross. Humanity is at one with the divine in Jesus—on the cross as everywhere else in Jesus’ life.”59 Still, “the saving effects of the incarnation . . . are felt . . . no more so than on the cross, where those life-giving powers of the divine nature of Christ are so much needed—remedying the loss of the humanity of Christ’s own powers of life as they ebb away in full physical and spiritual torment.”60 A self-described “Lutheran feminist,” Thompson is all too aware of the deep linguistic chasm between feminism and Luther’s theology of the cross. Most glaringly, even the moniker “happy exchange” seems flippant in light of what we have seen feminist and womanist theologians say about Jesus’s death as an evil act, the unintended consequence of his life and ministry, inflicted upon him by violent and oppressive men. Thompson says, “a feminist theologian of the cross must employ an image that better captures the horror of the historical reality of Christ’s crucifixion.”61 An even deeper problem is Luther’s favored metaphor to describe the happy exchange, that of “Christ as a bridegroom who marries a ‘poor wicked harlot’ and takes on all her grievous sins, thus saving her from rightful damnation.”

Though Thompson subscribes to the happy exchange model, largely unaltered, she recognizes that the power of this original metaphor “is muted or lost altogether for women and men who cannot move past its obvious sexism.”62 Still, Thompson has hope that “Luther’s vision for life with the cross at the center and feminist visions for Christian repentance and healing can be brought together in ways that preserve the integrity of both sides.”63 In service of this hope, she re-imagines the metaphor: “Rather than a joyous exchange between Christ and the wicked harlot,” she proposes “the model of friendship: God’s atoning work for us on the cross is done through Jesus’s befriending humanity.”64 She recognizes that “Luther likely utilized the metaphor of marriage for the selfgiving love that ideally exists between spouses,” but notes also that in the Gospel of John, “the image of friendship explains the meaning of Jesus’s life and, specifically, his death on the cross.”65 Of course, Thompson’s friendship metaphor retains, from Luther’s less tasteful image of marriage, the notion that the relationship is established through faith.

So what happens when we employ the happy exchange model of atonement as rooted in the doctrine of incarnation and reorganized around the controlling metaphor of friendship? We can call this new model “incarnational friendship,” and I believe we will find that it addresses feminist and womanist concerns that God caused the suffering of Jesus on the cross and that

suffering as such is to be glorified and even prescribed to Jesus’s followers, while at the same time it sufficiently accounts for the gravity of sin and the salvific efficacy of the cross.

We have noted that, despite their robust doctrine of sin, some feminist and womanist theologians reject the salvific efficacy of the cross, in part because they do not want to identify the brutal suffering and death of Jesus as good, and in part because they repudiate the depiction of God as a harsh and demanding Father central to the most readily available model. In the incarnational friendship model, by contrast, the cross is salvific and sin is objectively dealt with, not because on the cross an infuriated Father got the pound of flesh he demanded, but because in the “happy exchange” of the incarnation the sin of humanity is assumed into the Godhead, just as the righteousness of Christ is received by the faithful. That the cross may be seen as salvific does not mean that God wills or is party to the crucifixion, because the soteriological mechanism of the cross is the Word’s assumption of the same sinful humanity that resulted in Jesus’s death—not in the sense that Jesus committed sin, but that he really assumes our sin.66 What is saving about the cross is not the suffering or the victimization that feminist and womanists theologians are so concerned to identify as evil. The cruelty and pain of the cross are marks of the sinfulness of humanity that must be assumed by the Word. The incarnational friendship model “does not mitigate the horrors of the cross, but highlights them as what gives salvation by way of incarnation its urgency.”67 Further, the incarnational friendship model brings Jesus’s death on the cross into continuity with his public ministry and affirms the salvific efficacy of that ministry in its own right, seeing the cross as its paradigmatic locus. “One must not understand the saving consequences of the incarnation to be immediate,” Tanner says. “Instead, one must say that humanity suffering from the effects of sin is being reworked for its salvation over time, from Jesus’ birth up to and through his death.”68 In other words, Christ’s saving work is not limited to the cross, or to any other particular point in his life; rather it is extended over the whole of the incarnation. We are not saved from the pain of rejection until Jesus is dishonored in his hometown; from the agony of betrayal until Judas kisses his cheek. Recent tragedies in, for example, Baltimore, Maryland; Charleston, South Carolina; and Ferguson, Missouri, are not redeemed until Jesus is wrongfully arrested and mercilessly beaten. And we are not saved from death until he dies. Only then are those aspects of humanity assumed from us by the Word and replaced with the Word’s own acceptance and life.69 Neither does an incarnational friendship model glorify suffering. Tanner keenly notes that in the satisfaction models, criticized so vehemently by feminist and womanist theologians, there is an “externality” between the suffering of Jesus and God’s saving action. In this view, God saves as a result of Jesus’s death, “the way a reward follows the doing of good works.” On the incarnational friendship model, by contrast, “what happens on the cross does not evoke what God does to save, in any strong sense.”70 Instead, the assumption of evil and death into Godself is God’s saving act.

Moreover, because in the act of incarnation the Word assumes what is properly human, Thompson says, “we are not to imitate Christ’s suffering.”71 Rather, Christ’s suffering is necessarily a

unique salvific action. Thompson points to Luther’s exposition of the biblical story of the woman caught in adultery, John 8:3–11: Luther focused on Jesus’ reaction, noting that he did not demand suffering, payment, or sacrifice.

Rather, Jesus tells her, “Go and sin no more.” Luther described this pronouncement of Jesus as “laying her on the cross.” To live faithfully under the reality of the cross is to live as one who has been justified by God and opened to the brokenness and needs of the world in which one lives.72 Because of this “once for all nature of Christ’s death,” Terrell writes, the cross “is not sanction for anyone’s or any group’s victimization,” regardless of “the church’s historical attempts to impose the hermeneutics of sacrifice on any people whom it . . . would subjugate.”73 Thompson says the uniqueness of Jesus suffering in the incarnational friendship model is the “death knell” to any attempt to prescribe suffering as a measurement of self-worth.74 Notes 1. Borrowing a term from Alice Walker’s collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: A Womanist Prose (Orlando: Hardcourt, 1967, 1983), womanist theology is the re-examination of Christian scriptures, traditions, and practices in light of African American women’s experience, with the aim of contributing to their survival and wholeness. In Walker’s own words: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”

2. The designation “happy exchange” or “blessed exchange” became a technical label for Luther’s doctrine only in later expositions of Luther’s writings. The closest equivalent in Luther is fröhlicher wechsel, found in his “Freiheit eines Christenmenschen” (“The Freedom of a Christian”).

3. I cannot be sure whether this essay participates in the dynamics of power and privilege in which white men like me have routinely ignored, maligned, and misunderstood feminist and womanist theologies. When men have engaged women’s voices, it has all too often served as a sort of authorization of opinions that would otherwise have remained unheard for no other reason than that they are “women’s concerns,” and often without redirecting readers back to the original sources. I am attempting to play the role of host here: inviting readers from various walks of life into conversation with one another.

4. Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” in Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse, ed. Joanne Carlson Parker and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim, 1989), 23, 2.

5. Rita Nakashima Brock, “And a Little Child Will Lead Us: Christology and Child Abuse,” in Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse, ed. Parker and Bohn, 53.

6. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), 54.

7. Williams, Sisters, 54–5.

8. Williams, Sisters, 143.

9. Williams, Sisters, 143.

10. Williams, Sisters, 143.

11. Williams, Sisters, 145.

12. JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 114.

13. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 1.

14. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 4.

15. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 1.

16. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 8.

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17. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 8.

18. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 9.

19. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 8–9.

20. Williams, Sisters, 143.

21. Williams, Sisters, 143.

22. Williams, Sisters, 147.

23. Peter Steinfels, “Cries of Heresy After Feminist Meet,” New York Times, May 14, 1994.

24. Williams, Sisters, 148.

25. Williams, Sisters, 146–47.

26. Williams, Sisters, 146.

27. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 26–7.

28. Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1992, 2002), 159.

29. Johnson, She Who Is, 263.

30. Johnson, She Who Is, 263.

31. Johnson, She Who Is, 160–61.

32. Johnson, She Who Is, 159.

33. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 139.

34. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 142.

35. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 139.

36. Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005), 100.

37. Johnson, She Who Is, 158.

38. See Johnson, She Who Is, 158; Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do with It?, 100.

39. Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do with It?, 100.

40. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 112.

41. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 142.

42. Brock, “Little Child,” 52.

43. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 18.

44. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 19.

45. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 124.

46. Johnson, She Who Is, 248.

47. Johnson, She Who Is, 159.

48. Johnson, She Who Is, 253.

49. Johnson, She Who Is, 253–54. Re-imagining the categories of power and pain is precisely what Johnson does, rather eloquently, in the concluding chapter of She Who Is. Unfortunately space does not permit a full discussion of those re-imagined categories here.

50. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 14–15.

51. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 16–17.

52. Brown and Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” 18.

53. Lacking space to engage the relevant texts here, I simply note, as Gustaf Aulén observed some eighty years ago, that many historians of doctrine missed, and continue to miss, the fact that, though Luther occasionally employed terminology proper to the satisfaction theory, he gave “the terms in question new meaning and placed them in new contexts” (Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert [Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1931], 125). On those occasions when Luther takes care to express himself with the greatest possible exactness, he always employs a strictly incarnational perspective. It should come as no surprise, however, that an atonement theory rooted in the practice of penance, and dependent upon the notion that law and order are the typical expression of God’s relation to humanity, does not fit organically into Luther’s corpus. Nevertheless, for many years the only known alternative to Anselm’s satisfaction theory was some version of the moral exemplar theory, “the so-called subjective view, and the evident fact that Luther’s teaching on the Atonement was fully ‘objective’ . . . seemed sufficient proof that it was to be ranged with that of Anselm” (Aulén, Christus Victor, 120).

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54. Kathryn Tanner, “Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice: A FeministInspired Reappraisal,” AThR 86, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 40.

55. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 35.

56. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 39–40.

57. Martin Luther, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989, 2005), 135.

58. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 41.

59. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 43.

60. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 41.

61. Deanna Thompson, Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004), 135.

62. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, 136.

63. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, xi.

64. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, 136.

65. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, 136. While I appreciate Thompson’s critique of the misogynistic language inherent in Luther’s metaphor, I am not convinced friendship can cover all the ground the matrimonial image does, given that part of the power of the metaphor is the legal mechanism whereby one acquires what properly belongs to one’s spouse.

66. Indeed, Tanner argues that an incarnational model of atonement will require a radical—and potentially problematic—alteration of classical Christology. “To see the connection [between the incarnation and] the cross one must also not think of the humanity which the Word assumes, as anything other than fallen humanity adversely affected by the consequences of sin. One must not identify it, say, with the pure, prelapsarian humanity favored in medieval accounts of the incarnation. If the humanity assumed by the Word were already in such great shape, then it would have no need of becoming the Word’s own in order to be any different.” Tanner, “Incarnation,” 45–46. Luther similarly understands the incarnation to mean that Christ assumed, not a neutral or idealized human nature, but a concrete and actual human nature, in which he really bears the sins of all human beings.

In his 1535 “Lectures on Galatians,” he writes: “Christ was to become the greatest thief, murderer, adulterer, robber, desecrator, blasphemer, etc., there has ever been anywhere in the world. . . . He is a sinner, who . . . has and bears the sins of all [people] in his body—not in the sense that he has committed them but in the sense that he took these sins, committed by us, upon his own body, in order to make satisfaction for them with his own blood.” Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians, 1535,” in Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–86), 26:277.

67. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 47.

68. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 46.

69. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 47.

70. Tanner, “Incarnation,” 43.

71. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, 132.

72. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, 134.

73. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 124.

74. Thompson, Crossing the Divide, 134.

JOSEPH MORGAN-SMITH is a PhD student in systematic theology and a teaching fellow in the department of theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a BA in theology from Eastern University and an MA in systematic and philosophical theology from The University of Nottingham in England. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and three children.

Against Eternal Submission: Changing the Doctrine of the Trinity Endangers the Doctrine of Salvation and Women D. Glenn Butner Jr. Etienne Gilson spoke of medieval theology as an attempt to build great “cathedrals of the mind,” mental constructions meant to bring glory to God and to inspire worship as soaring stone cathedrals across Europe have since the same time period. Like any architectural achievement, these mental cathedrals brought together the many pieces of Christian doctrine into coherent and often beautiful structures of thought, building idea upon idea until great theological and philosophical systems emerged from scriptural foundations. This architectural analogy implies something important—it is rarely possible to shift the ground floor of a building without the entirety of the construct tumbling down. Only with great caution and preparation, whereby new supports are carefully constructed before the old are removed, can such a change go smoothly. Unfortunately, evangelical theology finds itself today in a situation where a great shift in a foundational doctrine of Christian theology has occurred—in the doctrine of the Trinity. This shift threatens several important Christian teachings and compromises the basic orientation of Christian ethics. As complementarian theologians increasingly speak of the eternal functional subordination of the Son (hereafter EFS), they move a central pillar of the cathedral of Christian doctrine, unaware that such a change could bring down the entire edifice of Christian theology.

With this situation in mind, this article will not focus on direct reasons why EFS is a destructive articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, though I believe it certainly is, nor will it primarily explain why the Trinity is a poor analogy for human or gender relationships, though again I believe that it is. Rather, I will seek to explain how moving the foundational doctrine of the Trinity leaves the doctrine of salvation (atonement) without structural integrity—to continue the cathedral metaphor. But the problem does not stop here. When noted complementarians shift the doctrine of the Trinity by teaching the eternal submission of the Son, they foster a basic ethical orientation that is contrary to the biblical perspective and potentially harmful to Christian women. To put the matter as clearly as I know how, EFS eliminates the theological understanding preserved in traditional understandings of salvation (specifically what I will call transactional atonement theory), and it undermines the moral perspective within which such traditional theories are properly rooted in the goodness of God as revealed in the Bible.

Theories on the Atonement and the Trinity Several key terms must be explained before the argument can unfold. First, EFS is the name by which we classify the argument that the Son eternally submits to the Father in obedience to the Father’s will as a form of functional subordination. This subordination is called “functional” because those who affirm EFS claim that the Father and Son are still equal in power, glory, and nature, so the Son is only subordinate in role. This formula intentionally parallels the argument by some complementarians that man and woman are equal in worth but called to differing roles—including that women are, through the whole of life,

submissive to men. For some theologians, EFS serves as the eternal basis for distinguishing between the persons of the Trinity in contrast to more traditional accounts of eternal generation (how the Son proceeds from the Father) and spiration (how the Spirit proceeds from the Father).1 For others, eternal submission supplements such traditional accounts of procession2 that emphasize the “distinguishing characteristics related to origin” to explain the “active expression” of the “distinguishing personal characteristics” of the Father, Son, and Spirit.3 However, all advocates of EFS share the belief that the Son’s submission to the Father in the divine economy (the term theologians typically use to speak of God’s work in creation and redemption) points back to the Son’s eternal submission within the immanent Trinity (the term used to describe the relational life of the Trinity that exists apart from any reference to their work in creation or redemption). Nearly uniformly, advocates of EFS use the Trinity as an illustration of the relations between husband and wife, where wives should submit to husbands as the Son submits to the Father.4 In Bruce Ware’s words, egalitarianism has “chafed at the very nature of God himself.”5 What seems to be an obscure debate over the eternal relations within the Trinity in fact has dramatic consequences for the ways that some complementarians argue against egalitarianism.

Second, I need to distinguish between various theories of atonement, which can be classified as either cosmic, revelatory, or transactional. Cosmic theories of atonement emphasize how Christ’s work brings about some form of change for the entirety of the created order. For example, the “classical type” of atonement presented in Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor is a cosmic model insofar as it centers the Son’s victory over powers of evil, with the cosmic significance of initiating the eternal dominion of God.6 Revelatory models of the atonement emphasize the manner in which Christ’s death reveals something about God or about humanity. Revelatory models include Peter Abelard’s exemplary model, with its emphasis on how Christ’s death reveals the love of God that justifies us,7 or Hugo Grotius’s emphasis on how Christ’s death manifests the justice of God in its condemnation of sin.8 Transactional models highlight the manner in which Christ’s death was an exchange between the Son and the Father resulting in salvation. This essay will focus on transactional theories of atonement, so I will explain the two predominant models in greater depth before moving to explain how EFS undermines these theories with harmful ethical consequences, especially for Christian women.

Anselm of Canterbury and the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo is a theological text with tremendous impact on the development of systematic theology in the West and its emphasis on transactional theories of atonement.9 Writing to explain the basis for the incarnation and the need for the crucifixion, Anselm also manages to develop a sophisticated treatment of creation, providence, Christology, Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 15

hamartiology (the doctrine of sin), etc. Two dimensions of Anselm’s thought are particularly important for understanding his specific treatment of the atonement. First, Anselm draws on Augustinian themes to understand God as the one who directs the universe according to the divine will (that is, as iustissimus ordinator) or, so that there is a certain rectitude or, to use Alister McGrath’s summary, the “basic God-given order of creation.”10 Simply put, creation is designed to exist in harmony with the divine will. Justice (iustitia) in Anselm’s words, thus becomes a “rectitude of will served for its own sake,”11 a means by which creature and creation are in harmony with the intent of the Creator. Second, and closely related, is Anselm’s notion of sin.

Sin is considered unjust “on account of an unjust will” that yields to temptation rather than retaining the rectitude of conformity to the divine will.12 Indeed, Anselm writes that “justice of will” is the “whole and complete honor which we owe God.”13 As R. W. Southern summarizes, “Any movement of the disobedient will, however slight, disturbs the perfect order of God’s creation in a way that nothing within the system can correct.”14 What God designed in creation, sin undoes in rebellion, and herein lies the dilemma. Should God abandon the divine intention behind creation to allow sin and disordered wills to prevail? Certainly not, for then God would have created in vain.15 Should God pardon sin without punishment? Again, Anselm answers in the negative, for to do so would be to elevate injustice over justice, chaos over rectitude, thereby either reversing the purpose of creation or undermining the divine character.16 What, then, was God to do?

Anselm finds his answer in the logic of the God-man.

Through the incarnation, the Son assumed a human nature, and with it a human will (which Anselm clearly treats as a property of nature).17 Having assumed this nature, the Son assumes the obligation to honor God in justice, which is the rectitude of his human will. Anselm connects the doctrine of creation and redemption here: as the perfect human Jesus is able to live with a perfect human will in the manner God intended for all creation.18 Here, empowered by the divine nature, Christ fulfills the obligation incumbent upon human nature to honor God through obedience. The content of this obedience is quite important to recognize, for Anselm is clear that “God did not compel Christ to die, for in Christ there was no sin. Instead, Christ willingly underwent death—not by obeying a command to give up His life, but by obeying a command to keep justice.”19 Were God the Father to command the Son to die, the Son would be compelled to die. Justice would then require that the Son die to fulfill the obligation to the divine will, and this would undermine the second half of Anselm’s atonement theory: supererogatory gift.

The idea of this supererogatory gift recognizes that Jesus Christ was obedient to justice, but in an unjust world this resulted in his death. Because Christ also bore the divine nature, his death in obedience to God’s command to live a life of justice resulted in the death of an individual of infinite value, a gift that honored the Father above what was required and that restored humanity to right relationship with God such that punishment of all was no longer required.20 This is Anselm’s satisfaction theory, and it is one of two major transactional atonement theories.

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Reformed Theology and the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement Penal substitution retains the emphasis on satisfaction found in Anselm, but modifies or supplements it with an emphasis on punishment. Thus, John Calvin can write that Our Lord came forth very man, adopted the person of Adam, and assumed his name, that he might in his stead obey the Father; that he might present our flesh as the price of satisfaction to the judgment of God, and in the same flesh pay the penalty which we had incurred.21 Here is evident an emphasis on obedience and debt so central to Anselm, but it is coupled with the idea of penalty, which is much less important for the medieval thinker. For this reason, satisfaction theory and penal substitution theory can be contrasted as a distinction between a pecuniary model (concerned with debt) and a penal model (concerned with penalty as well as debt).22 The logic of penal substitution varies slightly between the numerous authors who advocate it, particularly within the Reformed tradition, but the basic idea remains constant. Fundamentally, penal substitution sees Christ’s incarnation and death as the cause of salvation because they manifest both obedience and suffering,23 the former resulting in the merit by which Christians are saved, and the latter satisfaction by which divine wrath is expiated and justice fulfilled.24 Though all of Christ’s life can rightly be classified as obedience25—and here Reformed thinkers generally distinguish between a passive obedience unto death and an active obedience that fulfills the law—a shift in how theologians view sin requires more than the obedience that led to the supererogatory gift (that is, a gift beyond what is required) so emphasized by Anselm. As sin became identified more closely with guilt that necessitated punishment, it was argued that God’s act of atonement must still allow for the justice of punishment.26 Hence, Christ assumed humanity both to fulfill an active obedience that satisfied the law by uniting divine goodness with human obligation, and a passive obedience in order that humanity so strengthened by its union with the divine could withstand the full wrath of God displayed on the cross which justice required.27 God’s wrath having been satisfied, and Christ’s merit being sufficient to purchase the salvation of the faithful, redemption is accomplished. Indeed, Reformed theology sees the obedience of Christ and the merit thereby obtained as the formal cause of justification.28 Thus, obedience remains central to Reformed views of the atonement, particularly given the Protestant emphasis on justification.

Eternal Submission Destroys the Logic Behind Transactional Atonement Theories Advocates of EFS have frequently been accused of Arianism29 for positing that the Father eternally commands and the Son eternally obeys. Critics of EFS suggest that attributing authority to the Father and obedience to the Son results in two distinct natures (ontology) with different properties such that Father and Son are of a similar substance, rather than of the same substance (homoousios), as the Nicene Creed affirms.30 Those who seek to defend EFS respond that obedience of the will is a personal property, one that is attributed only to the person

of the Son.31 This defense has disastrous results if one wants to affirm the two predominant transactional theories of atonement we have just considered.

Consider Anselm’s satisfaction theory. Those who defend EFS want to make obedience a personal property, but as Katherine Sonderegger notes, “Obedience is a matter of the will; and when we have raised the topic of the will, human and divine, we have touched on the nerve center of [Anselm’s] whole treatise.”32 As noted above, will is clearly a property of nature for Anselm, such that a dyothelite Christology (one that depicts Christ having two wills because he has two natures) lies at the center of his atonement theology.33 As soon as we claim that humanity ought to obey God, we must affirm a dyothelite Christology, so that Jesus’s humanity can fulfill that obligation. Only a human life and human obedience establish the atonement in Anselm’s theology.

If will is not a property of nature but of hypostasis (a personal property belonging only to one divine person), as EFS advocates teach, and if there is no human hypostasis in Christ (as the Council of Chalcedon declared orthodoxy, and as Anselm believed)34 then there is no human will in Christ, such that satisfaction is impossible. Perhaps, an EFS proponent might respond, obedience is a mode of willing proper to the Son’s hypostasis, but the faculty we call a will remains a property of nature. Here again EFS runs into a problem, insofar as it is not merely a human will that is required for satisfaction, but human obedience. If human obedience cannot be carried out in the human nature, then one wonders whether there is in fact any human obedience at all, or simply the divine obedience of the Son’s divine hypostasis. Better to argue along with Anselm that Jesus Christ “owed this obedience to God the Father; as His humanity owed it to His divinity.”35 Christ’s human obedience was an obedience of the human nature that was obedience to the divine will shared by the Father and Son by virtue of their shared and singular nature.

Throughout Cur Deus Homo, Anselm is at great pains to insist that “the Father did not force the Son to die against His will; nor did He permit Him to be put to death against His will.

Instead, that man willingly underwent death in order to save men.”36 Indeed, “the requirement of obedience did not constrain Him, but His mighty wisdom disposed Him.”37 As noted above, this distinction is of grave importance, because if the Father commanded the Son to die, and if the Son must eternally submit to the Father, then the Son must die in order to be just. His death thereby becomes the means by which he is just for himself without which he would not fulfill his own obligation as Son to the Father, instead of the supererogatory gift by which he offers freely what was not required in order to purchase humanity for redemption, becoming just for others. Simply put, if on the cross the Son is merely continuing his role of eternally submitting to the Father, there is in Anselm’s system no supererogatory gift and no satisfaction—there is no atonement.

The need for a supererogatory gift is why Anselm categorizes Christ’s death as a form of subsequent necessity, something resulting from his voluntary commitment to a promise, not something arising from compulsion.38 Anselm writes that “if you wish to know the true necessity of all the things He did and suffered, know that they all occurred of necessity simply because He willed them.”39 Anselm’s account relies on a concept similar to

one Protestants later discussed under the name of the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis), the eternal agreement by which the Father, the Son, and the Spirit adopt a plan for redemption.

Anselm depicts this eternal decision of God toward salvation as a mutual decision of the three persons, the Son committing himself in agreement with the Father and Spirit toward this course of action so that it was at once immutable and necessary, and yet entirely free, gratuitous, and supererogatory. So Anselm can write, “with an unchangeable will (immutabili voluntate) He freely willed (sponte voluit) to die.”40 Paul Dafydd Jones interprets well: “As Christ sets his face towards Jerusalem, his ‘immutable’ will is also ‘spontaneous’: this striking pairing attests to a deft integration of dyothelite Christology [Christ having two wills because he has two natures] and soteriology [the doctrine of salvation].”41 Here Christ’s human will and divine will meet in perfect harmony.

Here dyothelite theology meets a vision of the unitary will of God undivided by eternal submission or obedience but singularly united in the commitment to redeem the world. And here, too, advocates of EFS meet a theology of the atonement that is ultimately incompatible with their doctrine of God. At this point, I must digress briefly to address a key scriptural passage that can illuminate the accuracy of Anselm’s position: John 10:17–18. The passage reads as follows: For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.

(NRSV) It should be clear from the context of the gospel of John that the Father’s love for the Son is eternal (see especially John 17:23–26), so the passage does not mean that the Father’s eternal love of the Son derives from his obedience, but rather that this must be interpreted in terms of the salvific effects of the obedience as linked to the eternal relationship of Father and Son.42 John here treats the very question that so concerned Anselm—how the Son’s obedience relates to the Father and to the Son’s salvific work of the cross, and how it results in the love shared with believers through the cross. On the one hand, the passage reveals the Son being obedient to the command of the Father (and thus to the divine will). On the other, it depicts the Son laying down his own life of his own accord and volition. This passage particularly manifests a tension between subordination and equality that runs throughout the gospel of John,43 and it must be resolved.

Advocates of EFS resolve the tension through appeal to the immanent Trinity—the Son eternally submits to the Father and this is the basis for a full distinction between Father and Son. If this solution is pursued, then a different answer must be provided for why the Son’s death in John is a laying down of the Good Shepherd’s life for the sheep (John 10:15) if not by the merit of Christ’s supererogatory gift. When John says that the Father loves the Son because he lays it down, John would mean that obedience is the condition under which the Son is eternally the beloved Son. Likewise, if Christ’s death is a byproduct of his eternal obedience, it is unclear in what sense it is also voluntarily given “of his own accord,” as John teaches. The alternative is the classical patristic position which is rooted in the economic Trinity (that is, in Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 17

the functions and actions of the Trinity) and which appeals to dyothelite Christology—Christ having two wills because he has two natures. This interpretation suggests that the Father loves the Son in his humanity because of his perfect human obedience unto death, by which he fulfilled the covenant. Herein lies obedience to the command of the Father. However, the Father eternally loved the pre-incarnate Son regardless of this act of self-sacrifice, and the Son was under no covenantal law. In voluntarily fulfilling the law to the point of death, that is in laying down his own life for the sheep (10:11) of his own accord (10:18), the Son in his divinity is simply following the united will of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) such that supererogatory gift is possible. The Father loves the Son in his humanity for this gift, and by its imputation the faithful share in the love of God. Here, there is no obedience in the eternal life of the immanent Trinity but only that subsequent necessity (that is, necessity due to God’s decision) arising from the covenant of redemption (the pactum salutis). Following this classical interpretation, modern commentators are correct to see in John 10:17–18 evidence of how, for example, “the will of the Son as Mediator harmonizes completely with that of the Father.”44 A twofold harmony preserves both the doctrine of atonement and the doctrine of God. What then of penal substitution? The theological method deployed by Anselm proceeded along a philosophical trajectory to convince skeptics. Though Anselm’s arguments assume and even cite numerous scriptural principles, Reformed theological method generally spends far more time on exegesis, and far less on philosophical argumentation. Nevertheless, while the dyothelite Christology (Christ’s two natures, two wills) central to Anselm’s satisfaction theory is less explicitly integrated into Reformed accounts of soteriology, it is assumed throughout.45 As Jonathan Edwards puts the matter, Christ merely as God was not capable either of that obedience or suffering that was needful. The divine nature is not capable of suffering, for it is impassable and infinitely above all suffering; neither is it capable of obedience to that law that was given to man.46 A human will and a human obedience are required, both as a foundation for active obedience, and as the source of the merit whereby the faithful are justified and receive the imputed righteousness of Christ. Here again, accounts of will as a personal property or of obedience as a mode of a person appear to undermine the role of active obedience in Christ’s merit insofar as there is no human person in the hypostatic union (the claim originating from the Council of Chalcedon that Christ is two natures, divine and human, united in the person of the Son). The atonement is far more central to Christian theology than gender roles, so the problem EFS raises for transactional atonement must be taken seriously as a grave challenge to Christian theology, even if many complementarians are pleased with the gender implications coupled with EFS. Anselm’s philosophical emphasis on subsequent necessity (necessity due to God’s decision) is also not a central feature of Reformed accounts of penal substitution. However, it lies behind Calvin’s teaching that “the first step in obedience was his voluntary subjection; for the sacrifice would have been unavailing to justification if not offered spontaneously.”47 The 18 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017

Swiss Protestant theologian Johannes Wollebius (1589–1629) likely has something similar in mind when he warns that, “Unless he submitted to the curse willingly, his sacrifice was forced,”48 which is why Wollebius treats the cause of the office of mediator as the Trinity in its entirety.49 The Son voluntarily wills along with Father and Spirit to assume the flesh and fulfill humanity’s obligation to the law and to the divine justice which requires punishment. So while subsequent necessity and the resulting supererogatory gift are not prominent in Reformed theology, the elimination of these ideas through a theology that treats the Son as eternally obedient risks not only the atonement, but the theology of justification as well.

What is assumed as a precondition for penal substitution theory does, admittedly, remain hidden behind more central themes in Reformed theology. It is quite possible that an account of penal substitution that cites scripture without trying to make sense of the logic behind the scripture may retain the pastoral and exegetical elements central to penal substitution while unraveling the philosophical basis for this theory through EFS without many in the church noticing the ontological chasm at the heart of its theology.50 It seems that many in the complementarian camp face precisely the same problem. For this reason, we must also consider the pastoral and ethical consequences of EFS on penal substitutionary theory, that those less familiar with the philosophical concerns discussed.

Eternal Submission and the Elimination of the Moral Horizon of Punishment Perhaps the most common theological objection raised against penal substitution atonement theories is that they promote a culture of violence against the powerless.51 Feminist theologians often criticize transactional atonement theories as morally problematic because they legitimize the suffering faced by women, “since by sweetly accepting unjust suffering they become Christlike,” to quote Rosemary Radford Reuther. Here penal substitution is treated as a “tool for justifying domestic violence.”52 Another common argument claims that penal substitution is a form of divine child abuse, where the Father commands the Son to suffer for others. “Jesus,” Darby Kathleen Ray writes, “like a typical child victim for whom love is identified with obedience to the adult’s authority, obliges.”53 Leanne Van Dyk notes that the motivations of abusers are complicated and not easily explained in terms of their religious dimensions, but the testimonies of abused women do often suggest a religious component that may be linked to certain theological views such as penal substitution.54 Arguments could be multiplied, but the present sampling illustrates a widespread concern that where theology depicts the Father’s authority requiring the Son’s obedience unto death, then the power structure resulting in suffering of the subordinate may echo in the created order in ways that harm the weak and powerless.

Those who want to defend penal substitutionary accounts— and I certainly want to make such a defense—have two main arguments in their arsenal. First, penal substitution is scriptural, so where biblical inerrancy is affirmed, penal substitution cannot be avoided. The basic logic of transactional atonement is found throughout the NT, and a penal dimension is central to numerous scriptural tropes, ranging from Paul’s claims that the “wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23) and that Jesus became a curse for us (Gal 3:13),

to the argument in Hebrews that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Heb 9:22), to scriptural use of the term propitiation (1 John 2:2, to cite a single example). As helpful as Anselm’s notion of satisfaction may be, it needs to be supplemented with an account of how Christ’s satisfaction included our sins being imputed to him to do full justice to the biblical testimony.

The second defense builds upon the first by arguing that penal substitution is not in fact a situation where an authority figure requires the suffering of an obedient (functional) subordinate.

Instead, penal substitution depicts God assuming suffering voluntarily for our behalf. Stephen Holmes summarizes this line of defense well: The criticisms that begin with the feminist theologians assume an improper separation between Father and Son (and no account of the Spirit, usually). If we do not realize that God is on the cross, that God is taking the suffering on himself, then we have not begun to understand what is going on. . . . The story is not of a vengeful Father punishing an innocent Son, but of a loving and holy God, Father, Son and Spirit, bearing himself the pain of our failures.55 The philosophical commitments underlying such a defense are twofold. First, the divine will is the undivided property of the single divine nature such that there is no eternal relation of authority and obedience that could even potentially be construed as an abusive power dynamic.56 Second, and closely related, the idea that the Trinity works inseparably in the works of God in the economy of redemption (opera dei ad extra indivisa sunt) entails that the atonement is not something done to the Son by the Father, but something that the Son voluntarily undergoes without compulsion in accordance with the united work of the Trinity (see John 10:17– 18).57 Note well that these are the very two philosophical premises that EFS undermines. In the theology of EFS, the divine will is divided either because will is a personal property alone, or because the singular will is possessed in three divisible modes attributable to each of the three divine persons respectively. In the logic of EFS, all divine actions are divided insofar as the Father commands and the Son subsequently obeys.58 However, if all divine acts are accompanied by distinct actions of commanding and obeying such that, if one affirms EFS, it becomes extremely difficult to deny that the penal dimension of Christ’s death was something the person of the Father did to the person of the Son, and not merely something that the Godhead does in and to the humanity of Christ, as theologians like Anselm and Wollebius would argue.

Where theologians who reject EFS can argue that penal substitution is scriptural and clearly not an example of a problematic authority/submission dynamic, something that has been convincing to some feminist thinkers,59 those who affirm EFS must argue that penal substitution is scriptural and then grant that someone in authority inflicting suffering on a subordinate is central not only to the logic of the gospel, but to the very Trinitarian nature of the Godhead. I find this a deeply troubling distortion of the God revealed in Jesus Christ as attested to in the scriptures.

Philippians 2 teaches us to follow the example of Christ who forsook power to humble himself for the salvation of the powerless, yet EFS teaches the powerless to submit themselves to the powerful even to the point of death. Ephesians 5 teaches husbands to imitate Christ in sacrificing themselves for the wives who are called to

submit to them, yet EFS calls wives to sacrifice themselves to the husbands to whom they must submit.60 In the theology of EFS, gone is an ethic rooted in the divine goodness where the first are last (Matt 20:16), for the Father who is first never assumes the role of last,61 the least of these are no longer served for Jesus’s sake (Matt 25:34–40) but sacrificed in his imitation, and the power of God is no longer made evident in the weakness of self-humbling (2 Cor 12:9) but in the authority of one who can subdue the weak.

We are left with a pastoral theology centering the authority of the Father over the Son, whose obedience does not clearly establish redemption under traditional transactional models, and whose death in weakness at the command of the authority of the Father alone erases the moral horizon within which penal substitution fits the biblical picture of the divine goodness against all critics.

In the place of classical soteriology, I fear that we are left with an atonement theology without ontological moorings and an ethical universe with harmful ethical not to mention pastoral outcomes, particularly for women. This is a significantly different form of complementarianism from those versions rooted in texts like Eph 5, and in my opinion a form much more likely to lead to the harm and abuse of Christian women.

It took centuries to construct a theological system that fit theories of Christology, soteriology, and the Trinity into a beautiful cathedral of the mind, one faithful to the scriptures, inspiring worship, and compelling the church to ethical behavior.

In a half-century, evangelical Trinitarianism has threatened to undo that work in full. If a shift in Trinitarian theology toward EFS has such drastic ramifications for the doctrine of salvation, there are no doubt further problematic consequences for this change in other areas of theology. How many must be uncovered before EFS is abandoned remains to be seen, but it is certain that EFS should be left behind.

Notes 1. See Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 250–1; Bruce A. Ware, Father, Son & Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, & Relevance (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005), 69–71, 82; Philip R. Gons and Andrew David Naselli, “An Examination of Three Recent Philosophical Arguments against Hierarchy in the Immanent Trinity,” in One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life, ed. Bruce A. Ware and John Starke (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 204–5.

2. In accounts of the Trinity held as orthodox at least since the council of Nicea, each of the three persons in the Trinity are distinguished by their origins, where the Son proceeds from the Father by eternal generation and the Spirit proceeds from the Father (in the West, also from the Son) by eternal spiration. Thus, eternal generation and spiration are known as processions.

3.

J. Scott Horrell, “Complementarian Trinitarianism: Divine Revelation is Finally True to the Eternal Personal Relations,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism? Perspectives on the Equality of God the Father and God the Son, ed. Dennis W. Jowers and H. Wayne House (Eugene: Pickwick, 2012), 352–3.

4. Craig Keener stands as a notable exception, when he defends EFS but rejects complementarianism. Craig S. Keener, “Subordination within the Trinity: John 5:18 and 1 Cor 15:28,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism?, 52–4.

5. Ware, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit, 73.

6. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (New York: MacMillan, 1967).

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7. Peter Abailard, “Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (Excerpt from the Second Book),” in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, ed. and trans. Eugene R. Fairweather (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), 276–87.

8. Hugo Grotius, A Defense of the Catholic Faith Concerning the Satisfaction of Christ, trans. W. H. (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692).

9. Paul Dafydd Jones objects to the use of “transactional” to summarize Anselm’s model on the grounds that Anselm’s theory is rooted in the supererogatory gift of obedience. I do not think this objection carries weight, given that even a gratuitous exchange is in some sense a transaction between two parties. See Paul Dafydd Jones, “Barth and Anselm: God, Christ, and the Atonement,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 3 (July 2010): 258.

10. Alister E. McGrath, “Rectitude: The Moral Foundation of Anselm of Canterbury’s Soteriology,” DRev 99, no. 336 (July 1981): 205–6.

11. Anselm of Canterbury, On Truth, in Anselm of Canterbury, 5 vols., ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1976), 2:§12.

12. Anselm of Canterbury, The Virgin Conception and Original Sin, in Anselm of Canterbury, 5:§4.

13. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became a Man, in Anselm of Canterbury, 5:I.11.

14. R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 218.

15. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, II.4.

16. Anselm, Why God Became a Man I.12.

17. We can deduce this both from his explicit affirmation that justice, a rectitude of will, is found in rational natures in On Truth, and from his arguments in The Procession of the Holy Spirit where he claims that personal properties are just those that arise from relational opposition, i.e., from titles that cannot logically be predicated of the same nature, such as begotten and unbegotten, but which are in some sense ordered toward another. Anselm, On Truth, I.12; Anselm of Canterbury, The Procession of the Holy Spirit, in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 3.

18. Katherine Sonderegger, “Anselm, Defensor fidei,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 3 (July 2007): 350–1.

19. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, I.8.

20. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, II.18.

21. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2008), II.12.3.

22. Archibald Alexander Hodge, The Atonement (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1867), 35–6.

23. Hodge, The Atonement, 249; Zacharias Ursinus, The Commentary of Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G. W. Williard (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1852), 86; Robert A. Peterson, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Atonement (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1983), 72–6.

24. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, trans. and ed. John F. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 304.

25. “When it is asked then how Christ, by abolishing sin, removed the enmity between God and us, and purchased a righteousness which made him favorable and kind to us, it may be answered generally, that he accomplished this by the whole course of his obedience.” Calvin, Institutes, II.16.5; “Christ’s obedience comprises not simply a part of his life, but the totality of his Messianic work. . . . That was the sole purpose, we may say here, because it concerned the will of God which was oriented to the sacrifice.” G. C. Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, trans.

Cornelius Lambregtse (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 316.

26. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 345.

27. E.g., Zacharias Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, 87; cf. Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, in

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Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. John W. Beardslee III (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), XVII.i.4.

28. Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, 330–1. In a similar vein, Wollebius writes that the merit of Christ is the “external active cause” of justification. Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, XXX.i.5. With even less clarity, A. A. Hodge speaks of obedience as the “ground of our justification.” Hodge, The Atonement, 250.

29. Arianism is the heresy deriving its name from Arius of Alexandria, who was condemned at the council of Nicea for teaching that the Son was merely the greatest of the Father’s creatures, but a creature who did not possess the divine nature.

30. Examples abound, but two important examples are: Millard Erickson, Who’s Tampering with the Trinity? An Assessment of the Subordination Debate (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2009), 172; Gilbert Bilezikian, “Hermeneutical Bungee-Jumping: Subordination in the Godhead,” JETS 40, no. 1 (March 1997): 64.

31. Bruce A. Ware, “Does Affirming an Eternal Authority-Submission Relationship in the Trinity Entail a Denial of Homoousios?” in One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life, ed. Bruce A. Ware and John Starke (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 244; Gons and Naselli, “Recent Philosophical Arguments,” 204–5.

32. Sonderegger, “Anselm, Defensor fidei,” 353.

33. “Dyothelitism is a necessary corollary of his belief that humanity ought to render obedience to God. Were God to impose obedience upon Christ—say, by coercively superintending the humanity that the Son assumes—the soteriological fabric of Cur Deus Homo would unravel. Only because Christ lives and dies humanly, offering a human ‘compensation’ to God, are God and humanity set in right relationship.”

Jones, “Barth and Anselm,” 267.

34. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, II.6. Indeed, the question of the two natures and particularly of the two wills was a widely discussed topic during Anselm’s day and among the following generation of theologians. See G. R. Evans, Anselm and a New Generation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 155–61.

35. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, I.8.

36. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, I.8.

37. Anselm of Canterbury, A Meditation on Human Redemption, in Anselm of Canterbury, 3:140.

38. See Sonderegger, “Anselm, Defensor fidei,” 354.

39. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, II.17.

40. Anselm, Why God Became a Man, II.16.

41. Jones, “Barth and Anselm,” 269.

42. Rodney A. Whitacre, John (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1999), 266.

43. See John 1:1–18, 5:1–47, 14:28, and ch. 17. C. K. Barrett surveys some views on this tension in C. K. Barret, “‘The Father is Greater than I’ John 14:28: Subordinationist Christology in the New Testament,” in Essays on John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 19–36. In the end I affirm the patristic position that Barrett rejects as failing to present a real person.

Here Barrett’s attempt to conform the person of Christ to his experience of real personhood falsely assumes too great a continuity between mere humanity and perfect humanity united with perfect divinity.

44. William Hendrickson, Exposition of the Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1953), 115.

45. Robert Letham notes how Luther, Calvin, and key Reformed statements of faith all continue to utilize versions of Anselm’s satisfaction theory. Robert Letham, The Work of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1993), 165–6.

46. Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, 295.

47. Calvin, Institutes, II.16.5.

48. Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, XVIII.i.18.

49. Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, XVII.i.3. In the passage, Wollebius is speaking of the “efficient cause” of the office of mediator, but I have simplified for the sake of the reader.

50. For example, Grudem’s account of the righteousness of Christ deriving from his active obedience and imputed to the faithful treats Christ’s fulfillment of the law alone as sufficient for justification. However, as a human being Christ owed this obedience himself, so it is difficult to see why fulfilling his own obligation can in some fashion produce merit for all of humanity, which is the basis for justification. Due to his nearly exclusive emphasis on scriptural concerns, Grudem does not raise the question of supererogatory gift, nor connect the dignity of the divinity of Christ who voluntarily offers such a gift to the Father to the humanity of Christ that owes such a gift. Thus, Grudem retains the exegetical and pastoral elements of penal substitution, but he does not clearly present the underlying philosophy. See Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 571.

51. When the objection is raised against Anselm, it is easily refuted for several reasons: (1) Anselm does not treat punishment as the formal cause of redemption, but gift; (2) The Father did not require the Son to receive punishment, but jointly with the Son willed justice as rectitude of will; (3) for Anselm the death of Christ was not the death of a representative of guilty humanity as much as it was a death of an innocent one slain by a fallen world. Therefore, Anselm could perhaps join feminists in critiquing the death, though to a far smaller extent.

52. Rosemary R. Reuther, Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 99.

53. Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1988), 62.

54. Leanne Van Dyk, “How Does Jesus Make a Difference?” in Essentials of Christian Theology, ed. William C. Placher (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 211n17.

55. Stephen R. Holmes, The Wondrous Cross: Atonement and Penal Substitution in the Bible and History (London: Paternoster, 2007), 109.

56. Keith E. Johnson, “Penal Substitution as an Undivided Work of the Triune God,” TJ 36, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 53.

57. Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Nottingham: InterVarsity, 2007), 230. It is interesting that Ovey, who here appeals to the undivided divine operations and the shared willing of the Trinity in the atonement, remains an outspoken defender of EFS elsewhere. See Michael J. Ovey, Your Will be Done (London: Latimer Trust, 2016).

58. The use of “subsequently” should be treated in reference to logical and not temporal sequence. After all, its defenders ensure us EFS is eternal.

59. For example, a “hesitant” endorsement of this argument is found in Sally Alsford, “Sin and Atonement in Feminist Perspective,” in Atonement Today, ed. John Goldingay (London: SPCK, 1995), 162–4.

60. I set aside for the moment the egalitarian interpretation of Eph 5, partly to illustrate that there are different kinds of complementarianism.

61. If the Son is eternally equal in authority with the Father, he is the first who in the incarnation and crucifixion becomes last.

GLENN BUTNER teaches theology and ministry at Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas. He holds a PhD in systematic theology from Marquette University and an MDiv from Duke Divinity School.

This article was distributed to members of the Evangelical Theological Society as part of a CBE special edition journal focused on the Trinity and available for free at www. cbeinternational.org. Glenn and his wife Lydia have one son, Elias, and are joyfully anticipating another in April 2017.

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Truth Be Told: Leveraging Mujerista and Womanist Theologies for Ministry Among Victims and Survivors of Sex Trafficking Valerie Geer At the intersection of socioeconomics, ethnicity, and gender lurks one of the most insidious forms of violence against girls and women: sex trafficking. What theological insights should inform Christian ministry to victims and survivors of sex trafficking?

Female theologians who are well-acquainted with histories of multiple forms of oppression should inform Christian practice.

Therefore, mujerista (Spanish for “womanist”) and womanist scholars ought to be at the top of the list. Unfortunately, many evangelicals and other Christians whose praxis has primarily been informed by white, Western, male theological perspectives, are hesitant to consider theologies by and for women of color.

This is a mistake. Whether or not a person fully embraces all the theological points of womanist and mujerista theologies, these contextualized liberation theologies contain powerful and poignant biblical truths that are particularly relevant to today’s victims and survivors of sex trafficking. This paper will first highlight relevant definitions and themes in mujerista and womanist theologies, then examine the implications for ministry among today’s sex trafficking victims and survivors.

Mujerista Theology: A Relational Missiology Within Latino/a Liberation Theology Mujerista theology is a constructed, contextualized liberation theology by Latinas. Mujeristas assert that “theology is a praxis— that is, reflection-action that in a spiraling motion integrates the faith of Latina women with the struggle for liberation-fullness of life.”1 Mujeristas contend that their social location as both women and Latinas in the United States places them among the most marginalized. Latinas of all economic classes in the United States lag behind in education, health access and economic wellbeing, relative to other women, with the exception of African American and Native American women who share these lower echelons of societal status, putting them at a higher risk for sexual exploitation.2 Mujerista theology is grounded in an integrated understanding of salvation and liberation. Salvation is defined and experienced within the framework of relationship. Salvation means having a relationship with God, a relationship that does not exist without love of neighbor; the two concepts are inseparable in mujerista theology.3 Sin is viewed as that which hurts relationship. While sin is personal and harmful to one’s relationship with God, it is not private because it negatively impacts the entire community.4 Relationship with God is possible and meaningful because of Jesus. Not only did he secure salvation (relationship with God) in the spiritual sense, but he ministered liberation and freedom (relationship with neighbor) in the earthly sense by meeting the needs of the oppressed and marginalized of his day.

Similarly, many Latinas believe that Christ partners with them to meet the needs of their own communities. Because of God’s spiritual, justifying actions in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ on earth, Christians are called to spiritual works of justice and love on this earth, as well. Alicia Vargas, Lutheran mujerista and 24 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017

associate professor of multicultural and contextual studies at Pacific Lutheran Theology Seminary, summarizes salvation and its implications by stating: Before God, Christians are free from the sin that Jesus redeemed us from on the cross, and we participate in the gifts of eternal life through Christ’s resurrection.

Simultaneously, as we live in the temporal realm in this world that is also God’s, the Christian, if s/he were to behave as a one hundred percent justified Christian, would behave with other people according to the bounty of the blessing of God’s grace.5 Similarly, Catholic theologian and founder of the mujerista theological perspective, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, says: Understanding salvation and liberation as two aspects of the same process is grounded in the belief that there is but one human history that has at its very heart the history of salvation. By ‘history of salvation’ I refer to what we believe are divine actions—creation, incarnation, redemption—as well as our human responses to them.6 Vargas and Isasi-Diaz share the understanding that God’s salvific action in Jesus Christ and everyday human action for liberation are simultaneous. Consequently, the mujerista discussion of salvation immediately invades the realm of social action.

Salvation, liberation, and the coming of the kin-dom7 of God occur with one another, resulting in active engagement in the public sphere in order to address the realities of Latinas’ lived experiences in the United States.8 Vargas says: For mujerista theologians, the secular and the spiritual lives of Latinas are one. Christ’s redemption from the sin that separates us from our whole relationship with our Creator . . . empowers Latinas in our claim for abundant life for ourselves, our families, and our communities within the oppression and marginalization that defines Latinas’ life in the U.S.9 Some might criticize mujerista theology for placing so much emphasis on the lived experiences of Latinas, asserting that this is too subjective and creates a theological base line that is not normative. However, mujeristas point out that theologies tend to spring up from the understandings of particular groups of men, based on their experiences.10 Theology is not “a formal, disciplinary discourse in which adequacy is defined by certain intellectual criteria as they are understood by those who control the cultural and academic apparatus,” but an endeavor that desperately needs a deconstruction of the dominant normative perspectives that have not sufficiently addressed the needs of all populations, including Latinas.11 One way this deconstruction occurs is in the public sphere through the processes of denunciation and annunciation.12 Mujeristas denounce the systems and structures that are oppressive,

and announce a different and better way of living—one in which the gospel is appropriated into Latina/o communities. In order to denounce a system, it is necessary first to understand it and name it. How can mujeristas engage in la lucha (“the struggle”) against oppressive structures if it is not publically made known what those structures are and how they adversely impact the Latina community?13 Denunciation, therefore, requires an analysis of the multifaceted root causes of oppression: ethnic prejudice, sexism, and economic oppression, all of which are intrinsic elements of patriarchal and hierarchical structures.14 While denunciation is grounded in Latinas’ lived historical realities, annunciation is declaring and working toward a future reality, one in which Latinas and their communities can appropriate the abundant life of the gospel. By definition, annunciation is liberative and practical (experienced through an improved and freer life). For Latinas, the struggle for annunciation includes creating space for self-determination, i.e., to be agents of their own liberation rather than having those in power bestow it upon them in a top-down fashion.15 Annunciation reflects back to the community a theological voice that empowers its speakers to be subjects of their own lives and agents of their own history.16 This empowerment finds its source in Christ. While Jesus’s crucifixion connotes God’s identification with those who struggle, Jesus’s powerful resurrection serves as Latinas’ empowerment for that struggle.17 In other words, the new reality that Latinas announce can only be realized relationally through the empowerment of the resurrected Christ in them (vertical relationship) and through them (horizontal relationships).

A new and improved reality includes three inseparable aspects of liberation: libertad (“freedom”), comunidad de fe (“faith community”), and justicia (“justice”).18 Freedom is first psychological, liberating Latinas in the United States from two obstacles that have historically held them back: apathy and fear.19 Apathy is experienced as a sense that the struggle is beyond accomplishing. Apathy looks around at communities that have been struggling for decades and concludes that the task is impossible. Culturally speaking, apathy is having an extreme external locus of control. Fear includes the fear of failing, particularly in light of the false-narrative that anyone who comes to the United States can accomplish what s/he wants if the individual is willing to work hard and sacrifice. Latinas can be afraid that their failure to achieve the status quo will be perceived as their own lack of effort, resulting in a negative self-image.20 Second, therefore, freedom is social, i.e., Latinas must work together to counteract fear and apathy. They must think together, devise strategies together, articulate the vision for their future together, and develop programs and plans together.

In addition to the aspect of libertad (“freedom”), liberation includes the comunidad de fe (“faith community”). The foundation of the faith community is based on the way many Latinas consider their intimate relationship with God as a pattern for relating to all of their loved ones.21 They cannot conceive of believing in God without relating to him on a daily basis, just like they do with their human relationships. As a result, sin is seen primarily as that which negatively affects the relational community. For example, sin is not a matter of disobedience, as in not going to church, but sin is a matter of not being there for others, as in not taking

care of the children of the community.22 Sin that impoverishes or oppresses the community, whether it is in the community itself, or present within the structures of church and society, must be addressed by establishing praxis-oriented communities aimed at personal support and community action.23 One reason the community of faith is considered essential to liberation is the fundamental role family plays in Hispanic culture. “It is in the midst of familia and because of familia that at a very young age we are introduced to the ethical world of responsibilities and obligations, a world where one is because one is in relationship with others.”24 Family is not limited to blood relatives or immediate family, but includes people with whom the group relates. In this sense, la comunidad de fe, la familia de Dios (“the family of God”), and the kin-dom of God are virtual synonyms. Mujerista theology envisions and works toward a community in which harmonious relationship with God (a relationship inherently free from oppression) is experienced in a harmonious, liberated community, i.e., having one’s loved ones appropriate the gospel, resulting in a community existence free from sin (oppressive and harmful structures, practices, and relationships).

Libertad (“freedom”) and comunidad de fe (“faith community”) are the first and second aspects of liberation. Justicia (“justice”) is the closely-related third and final aspect. Justice is not merely a virtue or attitude, but a tangible way of acting and being, involving personal conduct and the organization and operation of social institutions.25 According to mujerista thinking, neither a person nor an institution or community can legitimately be Christian without struggling for justice. Justice means that people will have their basic needs met; people will be able to realize potential and live a happy and fulfilled life; people will have rights and be able to participate in all areas of life.26 “People” must include the poor.

The poor and marginalized must be the standard by which justice is measured. If the poor do not have their needs met, are not reaching their potential, do not have rights, or are not able to participate in all areas of life, then there is still justice for which Christians must work. For mujeristas, there is no separating the Good News into spiritual versus physical, or sacred versus secular.

The gospel is Good News for the entirety of one’s existence.

Womanist Theology Womanist theology, like mujerista theology, is a constructed, contextualized theology by and for a particular group of marginalized women in the United States. While mujerista theology is Latina (female), womanist theology is African American and female. They both seek to understand Christ in their own contexts, resulting in theologies aimed at caring for the community, addressing justice through praxis, and prioritizing the needs for healing and wholeness among their women.27 In this discussion of womanist theology, first I will describe and characterize womanist theology, establishing the context in which it has emerged. Second, I will highlight major theological themes.

Context of Womanist Theology Womanist theology begins with recognizing the context of African American women because “No theology emerges in a social, historical or cultural vacuum, and neither does any Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017 • 25

particular interpretation of scripture.”28 For African American women, this context includes the tridimensional oppression of ethnicity (being black in a white-dominated society), class/ economics (history of slave status), and gender (being female in a male dominated society and church). Black women are not the only humans to suffer, of course, nor are they the only women to experience abuse and violence, but “African American women have had a legacy of abuse and violence perpetrated against their bodies that has been justified through sexualized stereotypes and mythologies that denied the presence of God in them. It denied that they were created in the image of God.”29 Womanist theologians recognize that within society and the church, interlocking structures of domination support white patriarchal privilege and result in the dehumanizing of others.30 For example, to be both white and male affords one the highest level of political, social, economic, and ecclesiastical privilege and dominance; to be white and female eliminates male privilege but retains white privilege; to be black and male retains male privilege but eliminates white privilege; “to be black and female is to have virtually no claim to the privileges accorded in a white patriarchal society and/or Church. The black female reality is a marginalized reality.”31 Consequently, womanist scholars exegete scripture with an overarching hermeneutic of liberty and justice for the oppressed and marginalized. Womanists re-read the Bible from the perspective of the marginalized, de-centering dominant readings of the text (white, Western, male), and offering insights that they are uniquely positioned to see.32 For example, in the OT, white male scholars might emphasize God’s interactions with David as king; black male scholars might emphasize God’s relationship with Moses for liberating a slave people; womanist scholars might emphasize God’s interactions with, provisions for, and blessing of Hagar, a trafficked and sexually-exploited African slave woman. In fact, womanist theologians assert that their existence on the margins of society and the church actually lends them an epistemological advantage enabling them to accurately see the injustices and demystify the structure of domination.33 While womanist theologians function prophetically in helping the church demystify structures of domination, they do so primarily for African American women. As such, womanist theologians bring three assumptions to their theological pursuit.

First, they are committed to the survival of a whole people (community), including men, women, and children. Second, the primary audience is the African American community, but nonblacks are invited into the dialog. Third, womanist theologians search for the African American community’s understanding of black womanhood and God’s relation to it.34 Theological Themes in Womanist Theology The major themes of womanist theology can best be understood by examining the appropriation of two biblical concepts: on earth as it is in heaven and making a way out of no way. The former pertains to God’s liberative purposes for the here and now, not only the eschatological future. Womanist theologians affirm that the fully consummated kingdom of God (as it is in heaven) will be free from sin and structures that oppress, and therefore as agents of God’s kingdom come, they seek to live out

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these ethics on earth as it is in heaven. God’s vision includes an abundant life in which his children are free from unjust hierarchies of privilege and domination.35 Womanist theology empowers African American women as readers of the Bible, as agents and shapers of discourse by uncovering dominant cultural readings and assumptions so that communities can be transformed.36 In this sense, womanist theology fits squarely within liberation theology. Jesus is seen as relating to the oppressed as a co-sufferer and liberator. Because of his own persecution, suffering, and execution on the cross, Jesus is seen as God who identifies with black women in their shared experience of persecution and suffering.37 Similarly, just as Jesus’s resurrection signaled that there is life after the cross, it signals to African American women “that their tridimensional oppressive existence is not the end, but it merely represents the context in which a particular people struggle to experience hope and liberation.”38 Liberation and salvation are closely related in womanist theology. For example, if sin includes the tridimensional oppression of black women, then salvation is participating in the struggle for wholeness, i.e., liberation on earth as it is in heaven. Womanist theologians’ source of power for the struggle and for the realization of wholeness comes from the life and ministry of Jesus. They see him as including the marginalized and working toward the wholeness of his community.39 He healed, shared food, empathized, loved widows and orphans, forgave those whom society condemned, taught with wisdom, listened, wept, and conquered death.40 However, one of the founders of womanist theology, Delores Williams, asserts that God does not always liberate.

Therefore, womanist scholars’ major theological contributions center on their understanding and experiencing the God who makes a way out of no way. This phrase is a common refrain in testimonials by African American women in the church, and it articulates black women’s relationship with God as they navigate their lives.41 It points to themes of wilderness, survival and quality of life. Wilderness, such as the one Hagar finds herself in in Gen 16 and 21, or the one referred to in Isa 43:19 (“I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland”), represents the oppressive context of African American women.

Survival and quality of life represent God’s provision for and relationship with African American women within the context of slavery or oppression. In other words, even though freedom from oppression may not be a lived reality, God still intimately relates to African American women and gives them resources for survival and care.

Monica Coleman notes the phrase making a way out of no way emphasizes four important aspects of God’s relationship with African American women.42 First, it testifies to God’s presentation of unforeseen possibilities. For example, in Gen 21:19 God shows Hagar a well of water in the wilderness where she has not seen one before. Second, it testifies to human agency.

For example, Hagar exercises decision-making skills throughout her time as a slave in Abraham and Sarah’s household, decisions that embrace God’s direction and have her and her child, Ishmael’s, best interests in mind. Third, making a way out of no way reveals the divine goals of justice, survival, and quality of life. For example, God hears Hagar’s and Ishmael’s cries in the

wilderness and acts on their behalf to ensure survival and care, even if it means going back to Abraham’s household. Finally, the phrase connotes a challenge to the existing order. For example, even though the covenant child (Isaac), the child of blessing, was to come from Sarah, God still liberates Hagar and gives her and Ishmael a parallel blessing in Gen 16:9— “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”

In sum, womanist theology includes the motifs of on earth as it is in heaven, or classic liberation theology principles that focus on a praxis of struggling for justice for entire communities, and making a way out of no way, or the themes of survival and quality of life. Like mujerista theology, womanist theology is by and for a particular community of women as they relate to God, and, as such, is a relational theology.

The underpinnings of relationality in womanist theology are best articulated by Karen Baker-Fletcher in her work entitled Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective.43 She calls her theology a “Christian integrative relational womanist theology” that begins with God, who is found in biblical and experiential revelation, which includes relationship within the body of Christ.44 First and foremost, this quotation reveals that God is the ontological starting point. In womanist theology God is conceptualized as social. Both in his relationship within himself, i.e., the God-self or Trinity, and in his relation to all of his creation, we can see God’s social or relational essence.45 Second, the aforementioned quotation reveals the relational thrust of womanist epistemological notions, i.e., knowledge of God is found in his revealed Word and within an intimate, experienced relationship between him and humans, his creatures. In fact, many womanist theologians give supremacy to their lived experiences in relationship with God over and above biblical passages that may seem, upon first read, to uphold any kind of system of oppression (e.g., Pauline household codes related to slavery). Therefore, epistemologically speaking, womanist theology places experiential knowledge (relationship with God) above biblical knowledge. Finally, Baker-Fletcher’s quotation reveals the communal or collective nature of God’s relationship with his people, his body. Womanists not only know through the Bible and through their own personal relationship with God, but they know through their relationships with God’s people and the stories of how God works among them as a community.

Just as God cannot be separated from the rest of life because he is the source of life, womanist theology does not separate theology from any other domain, such as ethics, social concerns, or history.46 Womanist theology is inherently integrative, relational and interdisciplinary because of its ontological assumptions about God. God is seen as a divine community whose aim is for authentic community on earth as it is in heaven.47 As such, womanist relational missiology emphasizes the interrelatedness of mind, body, and spirit, and employs holistic approaches to further the healing and wholeness of entire communities.48 Ministry Implications of Mujerista and Womanist Theologies Because contextualized theologies, like mujerista and womanist, are by and for a particular group of people, the meaning may not transfer well or hold true in a fundamentally different context.

However, on occasions where contexts are similar or shared,

mujerista and womanist theologies can and should be leveraged for Christian mission to those groups of women. Victims of sex trafficking are one such group. There are a number of shared characteristics among mujeristas, womanists, and sexually exploited women. The most obvious is that they are women, not just women, in general, but women whose very lived existence is on the margins of society. In other words, mujeristas, womanists, and sexually exploited women are all marginalized and oppressed, victims and survivors of relationships and systems that refuse to acknowledge their full personhood and inclusion into society and the church. There are two major contributions that mujerista and womanist theologies make that can be leveraged for ministry and mission to victims of sex trafficking: a hermeneutic of liberation and survival, and emphasis on the life and ministry of Jesus.

A Hermeneutic of Liberation and Survival Mujerista and womanist theologies offer a biblical hermeneutic for women suffering under the control and oppression of a dominant group. Leveraging a hermeneutic of liberation, justice, kin-dom of God, survival, and quality of life is essential in Christian mission to victims of sex trafficking in the United States. Mujerista and womanist scholars rightly ask, “What does the Good News look like for us as marginalized and stigmatized women?” Any effort to reach sexually exploited women for Christ must also place this question at the center of mission strategy.

Consequently, the mujerista view of salvation and liberation as being two parts of the same process should be at the forefront of Christian work among sex trafficking victims. In order to understand and experience Christ’s salvation, victims of sex trafficking need salvation/liberation to be a physical, hereand-now reality, as well as a spiritual, heavenly-future reality.

They often need a liberator or, perhaps even better, someone who supports them in their own liberative agency to exit or escape the life of sexual slavery. This literal liberator or one who supports them in their own exit or escape, ministers the reality of Christ to them. Through a this-earthly-existence ministry of a liberator, sex trafficking victims can understand and appropriate the deeper and equally real spiritual liberation that is theirs in Jesus.

Additionally, the mujerista understanding of the kin-dom of God, or la comunidad de fe or la familia de Dios as a relational and collective entity also finds relevancy among sex trafficking victims. On their journey to recovery, victims need a new sense of family and belonging to replace the broken one from which they came. For example, victims of sex trafficking often come from homes characterized by trauma or abuse, and therefore a trafficker manipulates, grooms, and exploits them by luring them away to a new “family” organized around a pimp or “daddy” who has other sexually exploited girls or women under his control.49 The victim’s existence vis-à-vis the pimp and his other women becomes an essential, yet especially broken and harmful, family unit. Upon their exit or rescue from trafficking, victims must learn a new sense of family and belonging. The mujerista concept of kin-dom of God can be leveraged to create this new reality in Christ-centered community. It is different

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from a traditional understanding of “kingdom of God” because it replaces the male-oriented narrative of domination with a more inclusive and egalitarian understanding. For victims of sex trafficking who know all too well what it means to be dominated by men, the kin-dom of God concept is important.

The womanist emphasis on God’s relationship with women in the midst of their enslavement and oppression is also essential for application among sex trafficking victims because it acknowledges that God has enabled them to survive, and that he can and will provide resources, step-by-step, to ensure their quality of life. Womanist theology offers hope for sex trafficking victims by testifying that God makes a way out of no way. The womanist theological appropriation of Hagar, who is also a sexually exploited woman unable to leave her owners’ household on her own, bears striking similarity to the lived realities of sex trafficking victims, today’s modern slaves.

Womanist theology offers the victim hope by showing that God is present even in their oppression and exploitation. Rather than blaming God for allowing terrible atrocity, womanist theology rightly names sinful, exploitative systems and structures, and instead celebrates how God reaches through such circumstances to provide resources, care, and release for the oppressed.

Womanist-informed Christian mission to sex trafficking victims provides holistic care for traumatized women, resources for the development of their minds, bodies, and spirits, and advocacy in public and ecclesiastical spheres for their full inclusion and participation in life.

minister to marginalized women. Where sexually exploited women, including mujeristas and womanists, have been hurt in mind, body, and spirit because of misrecognition, Jesus brings healing through recognizing them as human persons made in the image of God, and ministers to them as such. He supplies their needs, speaks truth to them, extols their faith, and brings holistic healing. His lineage includes women of questionable reputation, and his ministry includes numerous women with sexual promiscuity attached to their social identity, such as the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, the adulterous woman in John 8, and the sinful woman who anointed Jesus in Luke 7.

Any Christian individual, church, or parachurch organization engaged in mission to sexually exploited women must embrace the mujerista and womanist theology pertaining to Jesus’s ministry to marginalized women.

The Life and Ministry of Jesus

1. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras: A Mujerista Christological Understanding,” in Jesus in the Hispanic Community: Images of Christ from Theology to Popular Religion, ed. Harold J. Recinos and Hugo Magallanes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 39.

2. Alicia Vargas, “Mujerismo and The Two Kin-doms: Distinction and Reconciliation,” Dialog 49, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 233.

3. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 18.

4. Vargas, “Mujerismo and The Two Kin-doms,” 233.

5. Vargas, “Mujerismo and The Two Kin-doms,” 231.

6. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 18.

7. Isasi-Diaz does not use “kingdom” or “reign” because of their sexist and classist connotations. “Kin-dom” is preferred because it is inclusive and connotes a sense of community and shared responsibility for survival and welfare.

8. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 19.

9. Vargas, “Mujerismo and The Two Kin-doms,” 233.

10. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 28.

11. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 28.

12. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 19.

13. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 19.

14. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 19.

15. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 20.

16. Serene Jones, “‘Women’s Experience’ Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Feminist, Womanist and Mujerista Theologies in North America,” Religious Studies Review 21, no. 3 (July 1995): 177.

17. Vargas, “Mujerismo and The Two Kin-doms,” 233.

18. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 20.

19. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 21.

20. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 21.

21. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 22.

22. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 23.

Both mujerista and womanist theologies look to Jesus as a model for ministry because he properly recognizes and identifies with marginalized, stigmatized women. Embracing this as missiological praxis among sex trafficking victims has two implications. First, it implies that those who work with victims must, like Jesus, properly recognize them as human persons made in the image of God. This requires a rejection of the popular narrative about sexually exploited women that can be seen in language used to describe them: dirty whore, worthless slut, hooker, ho, and so on. In her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa V. Harris-Perry discusses the history of misrecognition of black women in America. She points out that black women have been stereotyped as “Jezebels,” connoting sexual promiscuity or deviance, and as “Mammy,” connecting their value to the degree to which they put white people’s needs above their own.50 Victims of sex trafficking are also misrecognized in a similar way. They are assumed to be sexually promiscuous, loose women who have chosen a life of prostitution. Men who traffic them or purchase them for sex assume that these women exist to put men’s sexual needs above their own welfare. Christian mission to sex trafficking victims must emulate Jesus by recognizing the dignity and worth of all persons.

In addition to following the way Jesus properly recognized women, those who minister to sex trafficking victims must also follow the way Jesus talked with, touched, healed, and affirmed marginalized women. Mujeristas and womanists assert that Jesus cut through misrecognition to properly see, value, and

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Conclusion Womanist and mujerista theological perspectives are highly relevant for today’s victims and survivors of sex trafficking.

The lived experiences of these groups of women show that they are well acquainted with multiple forms of oppression, including violence against women and sexual exploitation. The salvific and liberative purposes of God proclaimed by mujerista scholars, and the survival and quality of life themes proclaimed by womanist scholars, must be understood and leveraged for ministry among today’s victims and survivors of sex trafficking.

Notes

23. Isasi-Diaz, “Identificate con Nosotras,” 23.

24. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, “Kin-dom of God: A Mujerista Proposal,” in In Our Own Voices: Latino/a Renditions of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010), 181.

25. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, “Defining Our ‘Proyecto Historico’: ‘Mujerista’ Strategies for Liberation,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9 (Spring–Fall 1993): 24.

26. Isasi-Diaz, “Defining Our ‘Proyecto Historico,’” 25.

27. Mitzi J. Smith, I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader (Eugene: Cascade, 2015), 2.

28.

Kelly Brown Douglas, “Marginalized People, Liberating Perspectives: A Womanist Approach to Biblical Interpretation,” AThR 83, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 41.

29. Delores Williams, quoted in Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 22.

30. Smith, I Found God in Me, 42.

31. Douglas, “Marginalized People,” 42.

32. Smith, I Found God in Me, 116.

33. Douglas, “Marginalized People,” 43.

34.

Delores S. Williams, “Hagar in African American Biblical Appropriation,” in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell (Louisville: John Knox, 2006), 172.

35. Douglas, “Marginalized People,” 44.

36. Smith, I Found God in Me, 49.

37. Monica A. Coleman, 14.

38. Jacquelyn Grant, quoted by Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, 15.

39. Coleman, Making a Way, 18.

40. Karen Baker-Fletcher, quoted by Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, 29.

41. Coleman, Making a Way, 12.

42. Coleman, Making a Way, 33.

43. Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (St. Louis: Chalice, 2006).

44. Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God, 16.

45. Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God, ix.

46. Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God, ix.

47. Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God, ix.

48. Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God, x.

49. Linda Smith, Renting Lacy: A Story of America’s Prostituted Children (Vancouver: Shared Hope International, 2009).

50. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotype, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

VALERIE GEER is pursuing a Doctor of Intercultural Studies at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

She is Executive Director of the House of Ezer (www.

HouseofEzer.org), a ministry for survivors of US domestic sex trafficking. As second-place winner of CBE’s 2016 Student Paper Competition, this article was part of CBE’s annual conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2016.

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Christians for Biblical Equality Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) is a nonprofit organization of Christian men and women who believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the fundamental equality of men and women of all ethnic groups, all economic classes, and all age groups, based on the teachings of Scriptures such as Galatians 3:28.

Mission Statement CBE exists to promote biblical justice and community by educating Christians that the Bible calls women and men to share authority equally in service and leadership in the home, church, and world.

Statement of Faith • We believe in one God, creator and sustainer of the universe, eternally existing as three persons equal in power and glory.

• We believe in the full deity and the full humanity of Jesus Christ.

• We believe that eternal salvation and restored relationships are only possible through faith in Jesus Christ who died for us, rose from the dead, and is coming again. This salvation is offered to all people.

• We believe the Holy Spirit equips us for service and sanctifies us from sin.

• We believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, is reliable, and is the final authority for faith and practice.

• We believe that women and men are equally created in God’s image and given equal authority and stewardship of God’s creation.

• We believe that men and women are equally responsible for and distorted by sin, resulting in shattered relationships with God, self, and others.

• God’s design for relationships includes faithful marriage between a man and a woman, celibate singleness and mutual submission in Christian community.

• The unrestricted use of women’s gifts is integral to the work of the Holy Spirit and essential for the advancement of the gospel in the world.

• Followers of Christ are to oppose injustice and patriarchal teachings and practices that marginalize and abuse females and males.

Envisioned Future CBE envisions a future where all believers are freed to exercise their gifts for God’s glory and purposes, with the full support of their Christian communities.

CBE Membership To celebrate 30 years of ministry, CBE is pleased to make available, for free, every Priscilla Papers article ever published. In addition, find the full archive of CBE’s magazine, Mutuality, and hundreds of book reviews and recordings of lectures given by worldrenowned scholars like N.T. Wright, Gordon Fee, and more!

Find it all at www.cbeinternational.org.

Core Values • Scripture is our authoritative guide for faith, life, and practice.

• Patriarchy (male dominance) is not a biblical ideal but a result of sin.

• Patriarchy is an abuse of power, taking from females what God has given them: their dignity, and freedom, their leadership, and often their very lives.

• While the Bible reflects patriarchal culture, the Bible does not teach patriarchy in human relationships.

• Christ’s redemptive work frees all people from patriarchy, calling women and men to share authority equally in service and leadership.

CBE Board of Reference Miriam Adeney, Myron S. Augsburger, Raymond J. Bakke, Michael Bird, Anthony Campolo, Gordon D. Fee, David Joel Hamilton, Fatuma Hashi, Roberta Hestenes, Richard Howell, Craig S. Keener, Tara B. Leach, LaDonna Osborn, Philip B. Payne, John E. Phelan Jr., Kay F. Rader, Paul A. Rader, Ronald J. Sider, Aída Besançon Spencer, William David Spencer, Ruth A. Tucker, Cecilia Yau

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32 • Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 31, No. 1 ◆ Winter 2017