Midwest Conservative Journal: about the invalid baptisms in Australia

You know, I’ve been reading a book for my theology of the atonement class. It’s a feminist book; now, I’m not fundamentally opposed to feminism, I mean, reading newspapers from the 19th century and seeing the court cases listed there convinced me that something had to happen. I even took a “women in the Hebrew Bible” course in college where we studied feminist scholars’ work on the OT. But, I could handle that because they were looking at techinical issues, historical interpretation. I’ve come to a conclusion: when feminists start using sociology or anthropology I break out in hives. It has been a struggle to write a five page synopsis of the first few chapters of this book [which is: Decieving the Devil by Dr. Darby Kathleen Ray] because I want to argue with the foundational assumptions. I can’t critique the content because I think the entire framwork is warped. Things are stated as fact without footnotes and citations (another HUGE issue I have with the book: no footnotes, only endnotes, even when it has a reference, which unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have enough of.) I mean, maybe I’m obsessive about it, but I don’t think you can state things like “over 50% of women have experienced rape or attempted rape in thier life” without ging a source for that–I mean it may be true (I sure pray it isn’t) but give some support, provide an explanatory note describing what parameters were used etc. . .

So why do I say all of this in regard to an article about a modalistic “baptism”? Well, its because I’ve been reading all about the evils of patriarchy and this priest claims he used the terms “creator, liberator, sustainer” because they were “more inclusive, less patriarchal.” Well, I’ve come to another conclusion: the notion of patriarchy isn’t useful anymore…maybe it once was, but its far to broad to be useful–I mean, what is an example of something that isn’t patriarchal? The feminist movement seems to have fallen prey to the same problem that postmodernism in general has: its wonderful at critique and deconstruction but it has absolutly no idea for an alternative or support for the belief that any alternative has existed or can exist. That seems to indicate that the term they use in their critiques is too general and without content. So, in my critique of the book I’m going to point this out. I’ve had to split my paper in two: five pages to summarize what the book says and a second section to deal with my criticisms.