Abstract
In this interdisciplinary work, Sally Douglas utilizes biblical studies and systematic theology to examine how Jesus as Female Divine was present in biblical and early church understandings, but was later suppressed in the second and third centuries. The biblical aspects of Douglas’s study engage with the topic of the historical Jesus and biblical developments towards Wisdom Christology. Douglas contextualizes her argument in the debates surrounding Jesus’ divinity among scholars such as Larry Hurtado, Bart Ehrman, Michael Bird and others. Douglas focuses on the relationship between Jesus’ association with Woman Wisdom (a figure linked to divinity) as it relates to depictions of Jesus as Female Divine. Unlike Hurtado and Ehrman who downplay the female aspects of Woman Wisdom (p. 5), Douglas spends much of her book focusing on the gender of this figure. Douglas’s goals for her study are expansive in scope, arguing they will impact assumptions of divine gender, church structure as well as ‘understandings of who God is, how God acts, and what this might mean for humanity and the very earth’ (p. 13).
Douglas divides her book into four main parts, examining texts from the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Proverbs, Psalms, Job), the Second Temple period (e.g. Sirach, Baruch, Wisdom of Solomon), the New Testament (e.g. 1 and 2 Corinthians, Colossians, Hebrews, the Synoptic Gospels and John) and early church periods (e.g. 1 Clement, Didache and Justin Martyr).
In Chapter 3, Douglas examines why these Woman Wisdom texts were used of Jesus. She argues that the shared experience of the divine and the ‘profundity of these collective transformative and salvific experiences’ (p. 72) led these early writers to link Jesus to Woman Wisdom as the Female Divine despite the prevailing patriarchal culture of the time. Modern scholars overlooked such associations from a general distrust of religious experience, rooted in Enlightenment ideals. Douglas maintains that Jesus as Female Divine/Woman Wisdom imparts divine knowledge, the divine feast, friendship with God, divine non-retaliation to God’s people, re-creation through the one who is ‘first-born’ of ‘all things’ via mystical experience of the divine. This impartation has essential implications for Wisdom Christology and realized Wisdom soteriology.
In Chapter 4, Douglas explains why this picture of Jesus as Woman Wisdom becomes suppressed in the second half of the second century and third century. She argues that, ‘for those seeking to control and contain authority within the early church, Jesus communities that continued to claim direct experience of Jesus-Woman Wisdom challenged this agenda’ (p. 109). Chapter 5 seeks to ‘re-recognize Jesus Woman-Wisdom’ (p. 163) and by doing so contribute to contemporary understandings of Christianity. Douglas uses David Ford’s interrogative field from his Self and Salvation to renew the scandal of the scandal of particularity of Jesus as Woman Wisdom as a ‘faithful, provocative, and compelling expression of Christian faith in the twenty-first century’ (p. 164).
While Douglas provides a compelling thesis that is at once engaged in key modern debates and creatively ‘orthodox’ in its approach and implications, her thesis can be critiqued on several fronts. While she acknowledges that not all of her chosen texts demonstrate links to the Woman Wisdom theme with equal weight, she tends to treat these texts with equal weight in her overall argument once she presents them. At times this can undermine aspects of her argument. However, this critique does not eliminate the value of her overview in demonstrating the prevalence of the Woman Wisdom theme in biblical and early Christian texts and its direct linking to Jesus in numerous texts. Nor does it obviate the importance of her insight for the need to ‘re-recognize’ the figure of Woman Wisdom as a way of understanding the divine.