Carol P. Christ > Quotes

“If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?”
― Carol P. Christ

“Religions centered on the worship of a male God create "moods" and "motivations" that keep women in a state of psychological dependence on men and male authority, while at the same legitimating the political and social authority of fathers and sons in the institutions of society.”
― Carol P. Christ

“After much diligent research, aided by other women, I gradually came to understand that beneath the familiar Goddesses of the patriarchy, there is a much more ancient Goddess.”
― Carol P. Christ

“The simple act of telling a woman's story from a woman's point of view is a revolutionary act: it never has been done before.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Even people who no longer "believe in God" or participate in the institutional structure of patriarchal religion still may not be free of the power of the symbolism of God the Father. A symbol's effect does not depend on rational assent, for a symbol also functions on levels of the psyche other than the rational. Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?”
― Carol P. Christ

“Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Man" it was said, had two natures, a rational nature and an animal or bodily nature. These two natures, it was thought, were continually at war with each other. Whereas reason should have been able to rule the body, all too often, it seemed, the body asserted its own needs and desires. The practice of asceticism, in the East as well as the West, arose out of the attempt to control the unruly body through denial and sometimes punishment. While women also practiced asceticism, the literature of asceticism, written primarily by men, is filled with images equating the temptations of the body with women and the female body. Instead of accepting the changing body as part of the self, asceticism attempted to deny it. Great cruelty to the self and the body have al too often been the fruits of this view.”
― Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World

“We need to build a new cooperative social order out beyond the principles of hierarchy, rule out competitiveness. Starting in the grass roots local units of human society where psychosocial polarization first began, we must create a living pattern of mutuality between men and women, between parents and children, among people in their social, economic, and political relationships and between mankind and the organic harmonies of nature.”
― Carol P. Christ Carol Plaskow

“To put it simply, for Plato change equals death and decay. Since the body is the location of death and decay, the human body and all bodies were found lacking. Plato found change so problematic that he imagined divine power existing totally apart from the changing world, as we have seen. God not only did not have a body; he was also separate from all bodies. This is the first theological mistake.”
― Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World

“Gradually, it began to dawn on me that the image of God as Father, Son and Spirit was at the root of the problem. No matter what I did, I would never be ¨in his image.¨ While I had hoped to find in God a father who would love and accept my female self, it seemed that ¨he,¨ like my father and most of my professors, liked boys better. I decided that unless we could call God Mother as well as Father, Daughter as well as Son, women and girls would never be valued.”
― Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality

“Images of the Goddess help to break the hold of “male control” that has shaped our images not only of God, but of all significant power in the universe.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Patriarchy is not simply the domination of women by men. Patriarchy is an integral system in which men’s control of women’s sexuality, private property, violence, war, and the institutions of conquest, rape, slavery arise and thrive together. The different elements are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate one as the cause of the others. Patriarchy is an integral system of interlocking oppressions, enforced through violence. The whole of the patriarchal system is legitimated by patriarchal religions. This is why changing religious symbols is necessary if we hope to create alternatives to patriarchal systems.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.- Albert Einstein
Watching birds has become part of my daily meditation affirming my connection to the earth body.”
― - Carol P. Christ

“We find in the Goddess a compelling image of female power, a vision of the deep connection of all beings in the web of life, and a call to create peace on earth.”
― Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality

“The serpentine path is the path of life, a snakelike, meandering path, winding in and out, up and down, with no beginning and no end, into the darkness, into the light.”
― Carol P. Christ, A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess

“When the earth is body of Goddess, the radical implications of the image are more fully realized. The female body and the earth, which have been devalued and dominated together, are resacralized. Our understanding of divine power is transformed as it is clearly recognized as present within the finite and changing world. The image of the earth as the body of the Goddess can inspire us to repair the damage that has been done to the earth, to women, and to other beings in dominator cultures.”
― Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality

“The women's movement will present a growing threat to patriarchal religion less by attacking it than by simply leaving it behind.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Without stories there is no articulation of experience.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Visual images of the Goddesses stand in stark contrast to the image of God as an old white man, jarring us to question our culture's view that all legitimate power is male and that female power is dangerous and evil. The image of the naked Eve brazenly taking the apple from the serpent, then cowering in shame before a wrathful male God, tells us not only that female will is the source of all the evil in the universe, but also that the naked female body is part of the problem. This image communicates to the deep mind the message that female will and female nakedness must be controlled and punished by male authority. In contrast, the Goddesses show us that the female can be symbolic of all that is creative and powerful in the universe. The simplest and most profound meaning of the image of the Goddess is the legitimacy and goodness of female power, the female body, and female will.”
― Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality

“Women’s stories have not been told. And without stories there is no articulation of experience. Without stories a woman is lost when she comes to make the important decisions of her life. She does not learn to value her struggles, to celebrate her strengths, to comprehend her pain. Without stories she cannot understand herself. Without stories she is alienated from those deeper experiences of self and world that have been called spiritual or religious. She is closed in silence. The expression of women’s spiritual quest is integrally related to the telling of women’s stories. If women’s stories are not told, the depth of women’s souls will not be known.”
― Carol P. Christ

“The symbol of Goddess has much to offer women who are struggling to be rid of the 'powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations' of devaluation of female power, denigration of the female body, distrust of female will, and denial of the women's bonds and heritage that have been engendered by patriarchal religion. As women struggle to create a new culture in which women's power, bodies, will, and bonds are celebrated, it is natural that the Goddess would reemerge as symbol of the newfound beauty, strength, and power of women.”
― Carol P. Christ

“She changes everything She touches and everything She touches changes. The world is Her body. The world is in Her and She is in the world. She surrounds us like the air we breathe. She is as close to us as our own breath. She is energy, movement, life, and change. She is the ground of freedom, creativity, sympathy, understanding, and love. In Her we live, and move, and co-create our being. She is always there for each and every one of us, particles of atoms, cells, animals, and human animals. We are precious in Her sight. She understands and remembers us with unending sympathy. She inspires us to live creatively, joyfully, and in harmony with others in the web of life. Yet choice is ours. The world that is Her body is co-created. The choices of every individual particle of an atom, every individual cell, every individual animal, every individual human animal play a part. The adventure of life on planet earth and in the universe as a whole will be enhanced or diminished by the choices we make. She hears the cries of the world, sharing our sorrows with infinite compassion. In a still, small voice, She whispers the desire of Her heart: Life is meant to be enjoyed. She sets before us life and death. We can choose life. Change is. Touch is. Everything we touch can change.”
― Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes

“The power of the Goddess is the intelligent embodied love that is the ground of all being. This intelligent embodied love undergirds every individual being including plants, animals and humans, as we participate in the physical and spiritual process of birth, death and renewal.”
― Carol P. Christ

“The God of Exodus and the prophets is a warrior God. My rejection of this God as a liberating image for feminist theology is based on my understanding of the symbolic function of a warrior God in cultures where warfare is glorified as a symbol of manhood and power. My primary concern here is with the function of symbolism, not with the historical truth of the Exodus stories, with questions of how many slaves may or may not have been freed, nor by what means, nor with questions of the different traditions that may have been woven together to shape the biblical stories. Since liberation theology is fundamentally concerned with the use of biblical symbolism in shaping contemporary reality and the understanding of the divine ground, this method is appropriate here. In a world threatened by total nuclear annihilation, we cannot afford a warlike image of God. The image of Yahweh as liberator of the oppressed in the exodus and as concerned for social justice in the prophets cannot be extricated from the image of Yahweh as warrior.

In Exodus Yahweh is imaged as concerned for the oppressed Israelites. Exodus 3:7-8 is a good example. ‘Then Yahweh said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters: I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.’ People in oppressed circumstances and liberation theologians find passages like this inspiring. I too have been profoundly moved by the image of a God who takes compassion on suffering, but this passage has a conclusion I cannot accept. The passage continues ‘and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.’ Here Yahweh promises ‘his people’ a land that is inhabited by other peoples. In order to justify this action by Yahweh, the inhabitants of the land are portrayed in other parts of the Bible as evil or idolators (a term that itself bears further examination). More recently liberation theologians have portrayed these other peoples as ruling-class opponents of the poor peasant and working-class Hebrews. However that may be, the clear implication of the passage is that Yahweh intends to dispose the peoples from the lands they inhabit.”
― Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a journey to the goddess

“Our great symbol for the Goddess is the moon, whose three aspects reflect the three stages in women's lives and whose cycles of waxing and waning coincide with women's menstrual cycles.”
― Carol P. Christ

“Theologians frequently assert that God has no body, no gender, no race and no age. Most people state that God is neither male nor female. Yet most people become flustered, upset or even angry when it is suggested that the God they know as Lord and Father might also be God the Mother, or Goddess.”
― Carol P. Christ

“In Old Europe and other traditional cultures, white, the color of bone, was the color of death, whereas black, the color of earth and the womb, signified transformation and rebirth. The symbolism was reversed by Indo-Europeans. It is likely that the Indo-Europeans used the symbolism of light to justify their conquest of 'darker' peoples. And, as we have seen, one of the foundations of dualistic thinking is the notion that the 'light' of reason enables 'men' to transcend the 'dark' earth.
The contrast between Old European thinking and modern western thinking is sharply drawn when we understand the positive valuation of blackness as one of the primary symbols of the Goddess.”
― Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality

“The model of patriarchy I have proposed argues that control of female sexuality is fundamental to the patriarchal system. This explains why there is so much controversy about the “simple matter” of access to birth control and abortion and so much anger directed at single mothers. The model of patriarchy as an integral system can help us to see that in order to end male domination we must also end war–and violence, rape, conquest, and slavery which are sanctioned as part of war. We must also end the unequal distribution of wealth inherent in the notion of ”private” property, much of it the “spoils” of war, which led to the concept of patriarchal inheritance, which in turn required the control of female sexuality. As feminists in religion we must identify and challenge the complex interlocking set of religious symbols which have sanctified the integral system of patriarchy–these include but are not limited to the image of God as male. Ending patriarchy is no small task!”
― Carol P. Christ