Daphne Hampson
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Margaret Daphne Hampson (1944- ) is a British theologian. She is noted for her sometimes controversial Post Christian views, and has asserted that Christianity is both immoral and untrue, a "masculinist religion". Educated at Harvard University and Oxford University, from both of which she obtained doctorates, she is Professor Emerita of Divinity at St Andrews University, and also teaches and researches at Oxford. She is also Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
[edit] Academic and Theological Work
During the 1970s, Dr. Hampson was one of the leading figures behind the first movement to ordain women in the Church of England. Other prominent women who fought for women's ordination include Monica Furlong, Una Kroll, Carter Heyward, and Susan Dowell. Hampson, however, used somewhat different arguments, based less in interpretation of scripture and tradition than in an "ethical a priori position" that women were equal human beings. In this Hampson was influenced by her doctoral work at Oxford, which examined the British response to the German churches' opposition to the Nazis or lack of it. Hampson found that just as the most courageous churchmen could not consider the German churches truly Christian if they supported a repressive government, so must the Church of England fail to be truly Christian until it accepted that women were full human beings and thus ordained them. She became disillusioned with this struggle when she found that few other theologians questioned the sexist assumptions on which the controversy was based, looking instead to Biblical or Christian precedent. This convinced Hampson that Christianity would not be compatible with feminism so long as it was rooted in a patriarchal past. Hampson decided that this must always be the case, since Christianity by definition looked to a historical linchpin within that past in the person of Jesus Christ and in the founding of a deeply sexist official church. She found this to be true both in conservative Christologies where Jesus was taken to be divine, and in liberal forms of Christianity that chose rather to emphasize the development of Christ's message over time.
Hampson believes the resurrection of Jesus to be physically impossible and some radical Christologies' attempts to locate the essence of Christianity elsewhere to be both unnecessary, if Jesus is not taken to be normative because divine, and dangerous, in that the sexist nature of Christianity is subtly perpetuated. Hampson personally considers Jesus Christ to be "a very fine human being," but no more than that and thus inappropriate as the model for all of humanity, especially if he is not divine and there is consequently no reason to force women in the twenty-first century to be judged by the standards of a male Palestinian Jew of the first. Moreover, she believes feminism, as an egalitarian social philosophy, to be opposed to granting any human being (male or female) "the importance which Christians accord to Christ." She does not believe the awareness of God which Christians have had to be in error, only to have been expressed in logically and morally erroneous terms in these particular senses. However, she does not consider that any reinterpretation of Christianity can overcome these errors and still remain Christian rather than simply humanistic or theistic, again perpetuating others' errors for no good reason.
Hampson's research combines theories of feminism and continental philosophy with the study of theology. She continues to believe in a theistic sense: that is, as she puts it, "I am very clear that for me the concept of God refers." God has an actual reality apart from mere human definitions of goodness, though Hampson is not sure that God exists separately from us or has agency apart from the efficacy of prayer, in which she strongly believes. The closest analogy to her conceptualization of God may be found in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, though Schleiermacher considered himself a Christian. She also admires the conceptualizations of God offered by Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch. For many years, Hampson continued to attend a Quaker meeting in St. Andrews, and draws much of her inspiration from the Quaker tradition, although she has never considered herself a Quaker and no longer attends Quaker meetings. In terms of what she believes to be an appropriate spirituality for the twenty-first century, she relies as much on an ethical model of human behavior as on her belief in a real God, taking many of her prescriptions from feminism, Quakerism, and the British peace movement, particularly that in Scotland. Her friends in the Scottish peace movement include Helen Steven and Kay Carmichael. Hampson is much less inspired by Christian feminism for her sense of feminism as a "spiritual matrix" than by radical feminist theologians such as Mary Daly, continental feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, object relations theorists such as Carol Gilligan, and feminist ethicists such as Seyla Benhabib. All have contributed to her sense that Western religion, and in particular Christianity, represents the projections of male psychology and that a feminist's conceptualization of God would look very different, though she is not interested in goddess worship or other anthropomorphizations, and her understanding of God is not overtly grounded in gender distinctions (in contrast to Daly's and Irigaray's). Rather, she finds both feminist ethics and ordinary women's experience to indicate a world in which the self is relational, thus potentially open to aspects of the self and/or perception that are greater than individual egos, as to the kind of intersubjectivity that religion has understood in terms of prayer.
In theory Hampson believes that both men and women can experience the self in relation and thus her nonhierarchal understanding of God, though in practice she has been skeptical that men will do so under patriarchy. She has also drawn upon the research of Alister Hardy and his followers at the Religious Experience Research Centre in collecting ordinary Britons' accounts of their religious experiences, which she finds to be more in tune with her sense of God as "spirit" or as "a dimension of existence" that can be "called into play" for our benefit, though God does not have power over us. Finally, she continues to be interested in the theology of Soren Kierkegaard and his fusion of Catholic and Protestant elements of faith. This was the topic of her dissertation at Harvard and forms the subject of her book Christian Contradictions, in which she argues that no reconciliation between Catholicism and Protestantism is possible. She believes this to be the case because each is founded upon an exclusive interpretation of what is the Christian revelation and the consequent relationship of the human being to God, a dichotomy that cannot be resolved without abandoning Christianity. (Hampson herself admires both Thomas Aquinas for his understanding of God as being present to us in an essence that permeates all reality, and Martin Luther for his belief in an autonomous spirituality requiring no ecclesiastical mediation.)
Though Hampson's work has been extremely controversial, she has many admirers among Christian theologians, including the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Her rejection of atheism and her theological rigor have won her an unusual degree of official respect for a feminist theologian, especially one of such radical views. This is not to say that she has not been challenged by other academics. She has been accused of scientism, privileging Enlightenment views of reason over the possibility of a resurrection or the social message of Christianity, and of essentialism, over-estimating the degree to which women are different from men. Many readers have pointed out that she tends to regard conservative Christianity as being theologically correct, in seeming contradiction to her belief in science and progress and her post-Christian spirituality. While Hampson has tried repeatedly to answer these charges, it is unlikely that they will stop given that liberal Christianity has inclined more and more to the opposite of Hampson's theological realism. That realism is at the same time the source of much of Hampson's fascination for religious liberals. If her arguments against Christianity have tended to overshadow her speculation in favor of theism, the latter may have aroused at least as much interest in the 1990s, when many people have fallen away from organized religion but continued to think of themselves as believers.
At a 1997 UK conference, Hampson summed up her attitude towards her own spirituality, revealing the fuel behind her many publications:
"I am a Western person, living in a post-Christian age, who has taken something with me from Christian thinkers, but who has rejected the Christian myth. Indeed I want to go a lot further than that. The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection, calculated to legitimise a patriarchal world and to enable men to find their way within it. We need to see it for what it is. But for myself I am a spiritual person, not an atheist. I am amazed at this 'other dimension of reality' in which there is; which allows healing, extra-sensory perception, and things to fall into place. I am quite clear there is an underlying goodness, beauty and order; that it is powerful, such that we can draw on it, while we are inter-related with it. I call that God."
