‘Becoming of Women’ as ‘Unfolding of God’ in the Post-Christian Theology of Mary Daly

Abstract

Feminist theology, mainly, is committed to dealing with theology to empower and liberate women. The theologian feminists have taken three approaches to traditional Christianity: revolutionary, reformist, and reconstructionist. Mary Daly, as a revolutionary feminist theologian, strongly criticizes traditional Christianity which, she believes, is based on unreformable sexism. She, using the method called transcendence, transcends the central Christian concepts and teachings such as God the Father, Christology, the Fall, and the Church, and expresses her main ideas in the form of post-Christian theology. In this article, by the method of text-oriented analytical interpretation, Daly's major ideas are explained and analyzed, including the concepts of goal, faith, freedom, ethics, and sisterhood, all of which can be actualized via ‘becoming of woman.’ To understand ‘becoming of woman’ from Daily's point of view, it must be understood in correspondence with God as Verb (the Verb of Verbs). God as Verb, as the ultimate reality, is Be-ing and is always dynamic. Similarly, women also have a type of be-ing that has the ability for existential participation and dynamic intuition in/of Be-ing, the result of which will be the actualization of the feminine Metabeing. The main reason for becoming of woman is women's inner aspiration for self-transcendence, which ends in a new unfolding of God called second appearance by Daly.

Keywords

• becoming of women
• goal
• mary daly
• transcendence
• god