Arnfríður Guðmundsdóttir Meeting God on the Cross

The cross of Christ has proven to be no less of a ̈stumbling block ̈ for Christians living in the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, than it was in the first century, when the newly established community of friends and followers of Jesus Christ sought to define the foundation of their faith over against the critiques of their Jewish and Greek contemporaries. This book presents a theological reception of the contemporary feminist challenge to classical christology by means of an explicit feminist retrieval and reconstruction of a theology of the cross. Gudmundsdottir argues that a feminist theology of the cross serves a dual purpose in feminist christology: it discloses the patriarchal distortion of traditional christology, and can also reveal lost dimensions in the understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Although Gudmundsdottir argues that feminist critique is an indispensable element of contemporary christology, she also claims that there is a redemptive message in the cross of Christ that is retrievable for women today. Despite its potential for abuse and indeed its well-documented history of misuse against women in the past, a theology of the cross proclaims Jesus as a divine co-sufferer who brings good news to the poor and oppressed, and as such can be a source of healing and empowerment for suffering women. The constructive task of this book is to show that a theology of the cross can indeed become a theology of hope today, offering women meaning and strength from a God who takes human form and enters redemptively into their situations of suffering.