Rosemary Radford Ruether

Rosemary Radford Ruether
Rosemary Radford Ruether photographed by Lynn Gilbert, 1978
Born	Rosemary Radford November 2 1936(1936-11-02) Saint Paul, Minnesota, US
Died	May 21 2022 (aged 85) Pomona, California, US
Field	Theology
Alma mater	Scripps College Claremont Graduate School
Notable students	Gina Messina Dysert
Influenced	Beverly Wildung Harrison Pauli Murray

Rosemary Radford Ruether (November 2, 1936 – May 21, 2022) was an influential American feminist scholar and theologian. She is considered a pioneer in the area of feminist theology, whose works helped stimulate a major reevaluation of Christian thought in light of women's issues. It was Reuther who coined the term God/dess to express the inadequacy of the traditionally male-dominated language of theology.

Reuther taught in several prestigious academic institutions and was a contributing editor to Christianity and Crisis and The Ecumenist. A prolific writer, she dealt with diverse topics, including the roots of antisemitism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, patristics, women in American religion, liberation theology, Mesopotamian mythology, and ecology. Her book Sexism and God-Talk became a classic text for its systematic treatment of the Judeo-Christian tradition from the standpoint of feminism.

Ruether was an advocate of women's ordination, a movement among Catholics who affirm women's capacity to serve as priests, despite official church prohibition.

Life

Ruether was born in 1936 in Georgetown, Texas, to a Catholic mother and Episcopalian father, but was raised as a Catholic. She describes her upbringing as free-thinking, ecumenical, and humanistic. Ruether's father died when she was 12 and afterward Ruether and her mother moved to California.

Ruether earned her B.A. in Philosophy from Scripps College (1958). While attending college she married Herman Ruether. She went on to receive her M.A. in Ancient History (1960) and a Ph.D. in Classics and Patristics (1965) from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California.

After completing her studies, Ruether joined the civil rights movement, working both in Mississippi and Washington D.C. Her concern with the problem of racism was further developed during her first decade as a teacher, at the historically black Howard University School of Religion (1966-1976). There, she became immersed in the literature of liberation theology and also involved herself actively in anti-Vietnam War movement, not hesitating to spend time in jail to dramatize her beliefs.

After a brief stint as a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, Ruether accepted a position at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She taught at Garrett-Evangelical for nearly 30 years, from 1976 to 2002, as the Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology. During her career, Ruether authored over 40 books and over 600 articles, primarily on the topics of feminism, eco-feminism, the Bible, and Christianity. After retiring from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Ruether became the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at the Pacific School of Religion and Graduate Theological Union.

Ruether died on May 21, 2022, in a hospital in Pomona, California, after suffering a long-term illness. She was 85 years old at the time of her death.

Theology

Intellectually, Ruether embraced the history-of-religions approach to the study of religion and the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. However, she remained a member of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, her first book, The Church Against Itself (1967) strongly criticized Catholic doctrine, and many of her other early publications attacked traditional Catholic views of sexuality.

God/ess

For Ruether, the Ground of All Being may be said to be the Cosmic Womb which generates all things. She argued that the biblical tradition suppressed the femininity of God, but could not ultimately escape it. God cannot be truly said to be either masculine or feminine, something at which the biblical authors themselves sensed in their critique of idolatry. Reuther coined the term "God/ess" both as a critique of male-dominated theological language and to emphasize that we in fact possess no adequate name for God.

Ruether's emphasized the immanence of "God/ess" as opposed to the transcendence of the patriarchal sky deity. For her, God provides humans with hope for transformation but cannot intervene to save us if we do not act on our own behalf.

Christ as a liberator for women

In her attitude toward Jesus, Reuther begins not with creed of the Church but with the Jewish concept of the Messiah. In Faith and Fratricide (1974) she examined the conflict between Jewish and Christian attitudes and how these played out in the tragic history of the Church's treatment of the Jews. By insisting on its own understanding of the definition and purpose of of the Messiah, she argued, the church's christology evolved along anti-Jewish lines. The social expression of Christian theology expressed itself socially in anti-Jewish riots and intellectually in centuries of writings by the Church Fathers "against the Jews." Reuther argued that, to rid itself of its anti-semitic tendency, the church must radically re-examine its christology. Particularly, Christians must no longer expect Jews to accept Jesus as their Messiah.

Reuther turned an equally critical eye to the tradition of patriarchy in the Church, as well as in the society of Ancient Israel. She argued for a new "feminist christology," applying the concept of demythologization to strip the concept of Christ from its "traditional masculine imagery." For her, the Jesus of the synoptic gospels is an utterly iconoclastic prophet who aimed at establishing a new social order, not only in terms of justice and righteousness, but also in terms of gender relations.

Reformulating God-talk

Reuther's most influential book was Sexism and God-Talk, a systematic analysis of Christian symbolism from a feminist perspective. Taking a dialectical approach, she did not hesitate to appropriate ideas from traditions which patriarchal theology came to disown. She thus dared to include ideas from ancient near-eastern polytheistic religion, classical "pagan" tradition, "heretical" Christian teachings, and the post-Christian literature of liberalism and Marxism, as well as Judeo-Christian scripture and "orthodox" Christian theology.

Regarding sin and salvation, for Reuther, sin is essentially a distorted relationship with God/dess, another human being, the earth, or even oneself. Sin is overcome by a radical change of heart, so that the values and vision of Jesus are placed at the center of one's life, and also are adopted by one's community. Salvation does not lie in some future eschatological kingdom but begins on earth in the here and now. The realization of God's kingdom involves bridging the gap between "what is and what could be." Humans must commit themselves ceaselessly to work to be in a right relationship with God/dess, each other, and the natural world.

Ecology

Another emphasis in Ruether's work is the ecological crisis. Beginning with a critique of the biblical concept of human "dominion," she moves to a analysis of the liberal concept of "progress" as essentially flawed. Marxism rightly recognized that education and political reform alone cannot solve the problem, but it failed to see that the expansion of the global economy cannot continue indefinitely due to the problems of overpopulation and an ultimate scarcity of land and resources. The romantic ideal of a "return to nature," on the other hand, tends to idealize primitive societies which were both exploitative and unhealthy.

Reuther finds a new model in the concept of the biblical Jubilee, a periodic suspension of debts and farming to return the social and natural world to harmony. Rather than a linear attitude toward history, she suggests continual efforts and perhaps periodic upheavals within historical circumstances that are not always possible to predict.

Controversies

In addition to her ongoing work as a teacher and writer, Reuther spoke out on various political, social, and ecclesiastical issues. Her political and theological commitments sometimes created conflict between her and the institutions for which she worked. She lost her first teaching job (1964–1965) and her only position in a Catholic educational institution—Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California—due to her pro-birth control and pro-choice positions.

Since 1985 she served as a board member for the abortion rights group "Catholics for Choice" (CFC). She wrote on the subject of Christian antisemitism while at the same time taking a highly critical attitude toward Israel's policy regarding the Palestinians. She was also an outspoken opponent of United State policy in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

In 2008, the Catholic University of San Diego Department of Theology and Religious Studies stated its intention to elect Ruether as its chair in Roman Catholic Theology for the 2009-2010 academic year. This decision was subsequently rescinded when members of the campus community protested that her academic work was incompatible with the Catholic faith.

Legacy

Internationally acclaimed as a theologian, church historian, teacher, and writer, Rosemary Reuther was a major voice in promoting a feminist critique of traditional theology. Her methodology of using historical-critical analysis to go beyond the patriarchal attitudes of the Hebrew Bible and the theology of the Church Fathers opened the way for the creation of a non-gender-biased theology in the new millennium. Her works have stimulated countless responses and developments both within the Catholic community, the Christian world generally, and other faith traditions as well. Regardless of what one thinks of her stands on political issues, her remarkable contribution to theology makes her one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

The author of nearly 500 articles and more than 30 books, among her best known works are: The Church Against Itself (1967); Liberation Theology: Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power (1972); Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (1974); New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (1975); and Mary - the Feminine Face of the Church (1977). Other works she as written, edited, or contributed to include: Faith and Fratricide: The Theoretical Roots of Anti-Semitism (1979); To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism (1981), Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (1983); Woman-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (1986); The Wrath of Jonah (1989); Contemporary Roman Catholicism: Crises and Challenges (1987); Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian (1989); and Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (1992).

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Althaus-Reid, Marcella, and Lisa Isherwood (es.). Controversies in Feminist Theology. London: SCM Press, 2007. ISBN 9780334040507
• Ansell, Nicholas John. The Woman Will Overcome the Warrior: A Dialogue with the Christian/Feminist Theology of Rosemary Radford Ruether. Lanham: University Press of America, 1994. ISBN 9780819195463
• Bouma-Prediger, Steven. The Greening of Theology: The Ecological Models of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Joseph Sittler, and Juergen Moltmann. Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780788501647
• Griffith, Colleen M. (ed.). Prophetic Witness: Catholic Women's Strategies for the Church. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009. ISBN 9780824525262
• Ramsay, William M. Four Modern Prophets: Walter Rauschenbusch, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gustavo Gutiérrez, Rosemary Radford Ruether. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1986. ISBN 9780804208116
• Snyder, Mary Hembrow. The Christology of Rosemary Radford Ruether: A Critical Introduction. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1988. ISBN 9780896223585
• Vaughan, Judith. Sociality, Ethics, and Social Change: A Critical Appraisal of Reinhold Niebuhr's Ethics in the Light of Rosemary Radford Ruether's Works. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983. ISBN 9780819131010
• Watson, Natalie K. Feminist Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2003. ISBN 9780802848284

External links

All links retrieved September 20, 2025.

• Rosemary Radford Ruether Rosemary Radford Ruether, a founding mother of feminist theology, has died at age 85 All Things Considered, NPR, May 22, 2022.
• In Memory of Rosemary Radford Ruether by Tara C. Trapani, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, May 26, 2022.
• In Memoriam: Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether Claremont School of Theology.
• The life of 'scholar activist' Rosemary Radford Ruether by Mary E. Hunt, National Catholic Reporter, October 15, 2014.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Rosemary Radford Ruether  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Rosemary Radford Ruether"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.