1936 to 2022. The major systematic theologian of late twentieth-century Catholic feminism. She names the cuts the trespass produces. The distinction that matters is which register each of them works at.
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THE WORK
Rosemary Radford Ruether was born in Saint Paul in 1936 to an Episcopalian father and a Catholic mother, raised Catholic, and took her doctorate at Claremont in 1965 in classics and patristics with a thesis on Gregory of Nazianzus.
She taught at Howard University's School of Religion from 1965 to 1976, alongside Black liberation theologians including James Cone. Then Garrett-Evangelical from 1976 to 2002 as Georgia Harkness Professor, then the Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union, then Claremont. She married Herman Ruether in 1957 and they remained married until his death in 2019, co-authoring several books.
More than thirty books across forty years. The Church Against Itself in 1967, a critique of authoritarianism after Vatican II. Liberation Theology in 1972, before the term had consolidated. Faith and Fratricide in 1974. New Woman/New Earth in 1975. Sexism and God-Talk in 1983. Women-Church in 1985. Gaia and God in 1992. America, Amerikkka in 2007.
She gave feminist theology the standing of a discipline, and she did it from inside the church she was contesting, as a Catholic, for her whole life.
[See MARGARET FELL · KATHARINE BUSHNELL · WOMEN'S SPEAKING JUSTIFIED]
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THE DIAGNOSIS
Her central move was to name patriarchy as a theological problem in the tradition's own construction rather than as a social problem the church needed to address.
The Christian theological tradition is built on dualistic hierarchies that map onto one another. Mind over body. Spirit over matter. Transcendence over immanence. Male over female. Human over nature. Soul over flesh. Heaven over earth.
Each is a cut distributing value to one position and devaluation to the other, and they are not parallel cuts. They are one cut expressing itself across registers. The mind privileged over the body is the male mind. The spirit privileged over matter is the male spirit. The transcendence privileged over immanence is the transcendence of the sky-father over the earth-mother.
And the deity-imagery encodes it. King, Lord, Father, Sovereign, Ruler, Judge: each title places the divine at the top of a hierarchy that maps onto the social order, so that the theology produces the order and the order produces the theology, which is the self-sealing part.
Her alternative was the recovery of immanence. The divine as relational rather than ruling. The earth as sacred rather than as material for use. The body as a site of the divine rather than the prison of the soul. And she coined God/ess to refuse the linguistic enforcement of the cut at the level of the divine name.
[See THE MARKED/UNMARKED STRUCTURE · EQUAL BUT DIFFERENT · KEPHALE]
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THREE EXTENSIONS THAT ARE LOAD-BEARING
The witch trials as gendercide. In New Woman/New Earth she read the European trials as systematic violence against women during capitalist consolidation: the hunts targeting the women who held the herbalist and midwifery and communal-medicine functions the emerging physicians' guild was displacing, the trials eliminating the bodies that held the prior pharmacological and reproductive knowledge, and the theological charge serving as cover. She published this three decades before Federici's Caliban and the Witch, at the theological register Federici would later extend at the economic one.
Antisemitism as built into supersessionism. In Faith and Fratricide she read the doctrine that the church has superseded Israel as the theological ground of two thousand years of Christian antisemitism: Christian identity constructed from the patristic period forward by rendering historical Israel as rejected and theologically obsolete, which produced the warrant, so that the Shoah was a consequence of an operation Christian theology had been running rather than a deviation from it. The book was controversial in Catholic circles and is foundational for post-Holocaust theology.
Ecofeminism. In Gaia and God she read patriarchy and ecological destruction as one operation. The cuts distributing value to male over female and human over nature and spirit over matter are the same cut at different registers, and the elimination of bodies on the dominated side of the first is the same shape as the elimination of ecosystems on the dominated side of the second.
[See THE WITCHES · SUPERSESSIONISM · MOTHERS OF EXISTENCE]
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WHAT THE INSTITUTION DID
Her church did not absorb the work. It excluded the body.
Catholic institutions declined to employ her, which is why the teaching career runs through Howard and Garrett-Evangelical and the Pacific School of Religion rather than through Catholic schools. Traditionalist Catholic criticism ran the length of her career. The Women-Church movement she co-founded was denounced. In 2008 the University of San Diego withdrew an endowed chair it had offered her. And Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, declaring definitively that the church has no authority to ordain women, answered directly the movement her theology had helped ground.
She continued, and she remained Catholic, and the remaining was the position. She would not let the exclusion place her outside the tradition she was contesting. The exclusion was the institution's act; her continued Catholic identity was her refusal of its authority to perform it.
And the response is the recognizable one. The institution does not distinguish between a body that disturbs at the axis and a body that disturbs perpendicular to it. It treats both as bodies that disturb the smoothness, which is the Bay's response to Hutchinson, the Established Church's to Fell, and the academic-theological establishment's to Bushnell. The bodies that did the work were the bodies excluded, and the work continued without authorization.
[See HUTCHINSON · THE PUSHOUT · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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THREE CENTURIES, THREE DEPTHS
Fell rendered the New Testament women in 1666 from Lancaster Castle, demonstrating that the record places women in full ministerial standing. Foundational at the level of the text's own instances.
Bushnell rendered the philology in 1923, demonstrating that the Greek and Hebrew had been systematically mistranslated to produce the patriarchal reading. Foundational at the linguistic level.
Ruether rendered the systematic theology in 1983, demonstrating that the cut runs through the tradition at every locus. Foundational at the theological level.
Three women, three depths of one operation, and the sequence is legible in the titles alone: Women's Speaking Justified, God's Word to Women, Sexism and God-Talk.
She worked inside a constellation rather than alone. Schüssler Fiorenza at the historical-critical level. Trible on the literary recovery of the women in the Hebrew Bible. Daly on the philosophical critique that eventually took her out of Christianity. And the womanist theologians, Cannon and Williams and Grant, rendering the operation through Black women's experience and naming white feminist theology's failure to register the racial cut, with Isasi-Díaz doing the same from Latina experience against both white feminist theology and male liberation theology.
[See EVE (BUSHNELL) · THE PREFIX DECIDES · CHAINS OF WOMEN]
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THE AXIS AND THE CUT
Her work operates at the axis, and the axis is the level at which the cuts have already been made. The dominator and the dominated occupy positions the cut produced.
Work on that axis can do a great deal, and she does all of it. Document the harm to bodies on the dominated position. The female body silenced in the church, the female experience excluded from the theology, the female imagery suppressed in the deity. Expose the claim that the axis is natural. The cut is theological and historically made and contestable. Produce solidarity. Women-Church, and the feminist theological academy. Demand redistribution. Ordination, ministerial standing, authoritative voice. Demand transformation of the relation so that the cut operates less violently.
All of it is real work, and it gives the bodies on the dominated position standing and recovery and solidarity and a diagnosis of what has been eliminating them.
And the tradition this folder carries works one level back.
The trespass that produced the axis is not the patriarchal cut alone. It is the installation of mediation between a creature and the encounter. The institutional church, of whatever kind, claims to be the necessary mediator between her capacity for direct encounter and what is encountered, and the claim is the trespass. The Light is in every creature. The encounter does not require administration.
So the patriarchal cut is a consequence. Once mediation installs itself, positions get distributed: clergy and laity, ordained and unordained, authoritative voice and silenced voice, and the patriarchal cut maps onto that distribution because what was installed was built by male bodies in a patriarchal setting. Reform redistributes the positions inside what has been installed. The cut between clergy and laity remains, and the mediation remains.
[See THE OCCUPIED THIRD · THE TOLLBOOTH · DIRECT ENCOUNTER]
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WHAT THE FRIENDS REFUSED
Fox did not seek a more feminist church. The Friends did not contest the patriarchy of the Established Church and demand its reform. They refused its claim to mediate the encounter at all.
And women's ministerial standing among the Friends followed from that refusal rather than constituting it. Once the mediation was refused, the distinction between male and female ministerial standing dissolved, because what maintained the distinction had been declined at the level that produced it.
Which is the whole distinction, and it is not a contest. Putting the two in contest would place them on one axis, and the point is that they are at different depths. Her diagnosis is true at the axis. The tradition's is true at the cut that made the axis.
And the cost of substituting one for the other would be the loss of the perpendicular. To make dominator theology the governing category is to position the work as a critique of position rather than a refusal of the axis, and the lineage running through Hutchinson and Dyer and Fox and Penn and Fell was not conducting a more sophisticated axis-register argument. It was standing perpendicular to the axis. The governing vocabulary has to operate where the lineage operates.
[See PERPENDICULAR SOVEREIGNTY · QUAKER SILENCE · FREE EXERCISE]
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She is acknowledged at the systematic-theological register and her vocabulary is not adopted as the governing one, and the distinction is the lineage's precision rather than a dismissal.
She did the axis work this folder stands on. The Friends did the cut work it continues. Both are refusals of the administration of a creature's encounter, at different depths, and collapsing them would cost the deeper one.
She died in 2022. Sexism and God-Talk had been in print for nearly forty years. The institution that excluded her did not stop the work, and the exclusion is a fact about what the work was.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
