Source: Economist:

Today’s Christianity has some sharply contrasting answers. For the fundamentalist, there is no problem because scripture trumps everything. At another extreme, radical and liberal theologians have ruthlessly deconstructed the doctrine of Mary and her virginity. With as much spleen as any secular polemicist, the retired Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong has said the figure of Mary, as presented by the church, is less inspiring to women than the comic-book character Wonder Woman, and equally mythical. “Mary was desexed and dehumanised by a condescending patriarchal hierarchy,” he thunders.

Yet another answer has been offered by Christian thinkers who take doctrine more seriously than the letter of scripture. They would say that precisely when God is at work, all earthly categories, including gender, are at some level overcome. With respect to Jesus, this is well-trodden theological ground: although he came on earth as a male Jewish subject of the Roman empire, he is said to summon all human beings to a state of communion with God in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…”

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