ABSTRACT
This fourth chapter suggests that the earliest second wave Christian feminist theological charge against the tradition was one of idolatry. The divine Father and the Son are idols when their masculinity is so certain a representation of divinity as to exclude women from all sacral and redemptive functions. The tradition is idolatrous because for men to make God in the image and likeness of the masculine entails that the worship of God is self-worship. Some feminist liberation theologians, most notably Rosemary Ruether, applied a broadly prophetic critique of idolatry to her own tradition. But the chapter also observes that one of Christian feminist theology’s most characteristically idoloclastic moves against the tradition was not to recast God in feminine or androgynous terms, but to liberate God from the operation of all finite human imagination through the re-deployment of older apophatic theological approaches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s provocative incitement to the ‘indecent exposure’ of the vacuity of white heterosexist idols.
