After Christianity

Daphne Hampson argues that a distinction must be maintained between the Christian myth and human awareness of a dimension of reality which is God. The myth is evidently untenable: there can be no particular revelation or intervention in history. As in any other discipline, so also in theology the criterion as to what from the past remains valid and what must be discarded lies with us. The myth is moreover immoral, serving through its rootedness in the past to undergird a patriarchal order. Working from a feminist perspective Hampson analyses major paradigms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition: the conception of God; the creation thereby of a concept of woman as 'other', and the peculiarly masculinist understandings of sin, salvation, sacrifice and covenant. A chapter on 'woman' shows how devastating (and irrelevant today) the Christian construal has been. How then should we think of God, in a manner both true to the evidence and commensurate with the moral imperative of human equality? In dialogue with Schleiermacher and drawing on the evidence of religious experience Hampson undertakes an original piece of constructive systematic theology. Finally she asks after the manner of life in which such a spirituality can flourish.