The Gendered Gaze Of Divine Law: Theological Patriarchy And The Asymmetry Of Sacred Justice

By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo

Why is it that across religious traditions, the woman caught in adultery faces stoning while her male partner vanishes into the shadows of scriptural silence? This puzzling asymmetry reveals a fundamental contradiction in how sacred texts have been interpreted and enforced: laws ostensibly from divine sources somehow consistently burden women with punishment while offering men theological escape routes. This pattern demands rigorous examination, particularly through the lens of African literary consciousness, which has long interrogated the intersection of colonial religion, indigenous patriarchy, and women’s oppression. The question is not whether God is unjust, but whether human interpreters have weaponized divine authority to sanctify gender inequality.

The biblical narrative of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11) exemplifies this asymmetry perfectly. Theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza notes in In Memory of Her that “the absence of the man in this narrative is not incidental but structural to patriarchal interpretation.” The Pharisees bring only the woman to Jesus, though adultery requires two participants. Mosaic law (Leviticus 20:10) explicitly demands both parties be put to death, even so the religious authorities apply selective enforcement. This mirrors the experience of Efuru in Flora Nwapa’s groundbreaking novel Efuru (1966), where the protagonist faces communal judgment for childlessness and marital difficulties while her unfaithful husband Adizua escapes social censure. Nwapa writes, “The women said that Efuru was a lucky woman. She had a husband who cared for her and gave her all she wanted. They forgot that she was the one who worked hard to maintain the home.” The irony is devastating: Efuru’s labor sustains the marriage, yet societal judgment targets her perceived failures.

This theological double standard finds its roots in selective interpretation rather than textual inevitability. Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether argues in Sexism and God-Talk that “patriarchy is not a divine mandate but a human construction falsely sanctified.” The Genesis creation accounts offer competing narratives: Genesis 1:27 presents simultaneous creation of male and female in God’s image, suggesting equality, while Genesis 2’s rib narrative has been interpreted to suggest female subordination. Early church fathers like Tertullian infamously called woman “the devil’s gateway,” claiming “you are the one who opened the door to the Devil.” Nonetheless this interpretive violence contradicts Jesus’s radical inclusion of women as disciples, witnesses, and theological interlocutors. In Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), the protagonist Nnu-Ego suffers under both Igbo traditional expectations and colonial Christian morality, both demanding her self-sacrifice while celebrating male prerogative. Emecheta writes, “She was a prisoner of her own flesh and blood,” illustrating how religious and cultural laws converge to imprison women in cycles of obligation without reciprocity.

The phenomenon intensifies when examining purity laws across religious traditions. Levitical codes regarding menstruation (Leviticus 15:19-30) render women ritually impure, requiring isolation and purification rituals, while male bodily emissions receive comparatively minimal restriction. Islamic jurisprudence in many interpretations restricts women’s testimony to half the value of men’s (Quran 2:282, though contested by progressive scholars), limits inheritance rights, and enforces dress codes far more stringently on women. Progressive theologian Amina Wadud challenges these readings in Qur’an and Woman, arguing that “the Qur’anic vision is one of gender equality, but patriarchal interpretation has obscured this.” In Mariama Bâ’s epistolary masterpiece So Long a Letter (1979), the protagonist Ramatoulaye reflects on her husband’s decision to take a second wife without consultation: “The heart of the matter is that, unlike men who are protected by the law, we have no legal recourse.” Bâ’s Senegalese context illustrates how Islamic law, as practiced, can facilitate male privilege while constraining female autonomy, despite the Quran’s emphasis on mutual consultation and respect.

African literature consistently reveals how Christianity and Islam, as imported or imposed systems, frequently compounded existing patriarchal structures rather than challenging them. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965) depicts the collision between Gikuyu tradition and Christian missionary morality, with female bodies becoming the battleground. The debate over female circumcision positions women as objects of cultural conflict rather than subjects of their own liberation. Similarly, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) shows how colonial education and Christian values offer Tambu pathways to autonomy while simultaneously reinforcing hierarchies that privilege her brother Nhamo simply for being male. The narrator observes, “The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even a legitimate concern.” Theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a pioneer of African women’s theology, writes in Daughters of Anowa that African women face “double colonization” – by external religious systems and indigenous patriarchy working in tandem.

The theological justifications for this asymmetry often rely on contested interpretations of headship and complementarity. Ephesians 5:22-24’s instruction for wives to submit to husbands is frequently cited without the preceding verse (5:21) calling for mutual submission “out of reverence for Christ.” Theologian Sarah Bessey notes in Jesus Feminist that “the Bible has been used to justify slavery, apartheid, and the oppression of women, but that doesn’t make these interpretations correct or divinely ordained.” The concept of “complementarity” often masks inequality, assigning women subordinate roles under the guise of difference. In Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes (1991), the protagonist Esi navigates modern Ghanaian society where educated women still face expectations of domestic submission. When Esi’s husband Oko forces himself on her sexually, she recognizes it as rape, in any case societal and religious frameworks offer no language for marital rape, no protection, no punishment for the male aggressor. Aidoo writes, “In this world, a woman has to understand and forgive all the time. But a man can always find an excuse to be angry.”

The punitive focus on women’s sexuality reveals the deeper anxiety: control of reproduction and patrilineal inheritance. Theologian Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror examines biblical narratives of sexual violence against women – Hagar, Tamar, the unnamed concubine in Judges 19 – noting how these women’s suffering often serves plot functions without their own narrative agency or divine vindication equal to male heroes. The virgin Mary herself becomes the impossible standard: virgin and mother simultaneously, sexually pure yet reproductive, silent and obedient. African women writers have interrogated this impossible bind. In Calixthe Beyala’s Your Name Shall Be Tanga (1988), the protagonist suffers genital mutilation, forced marriage, and rape, with religious authorities offering platitudes rather than protection. The law punishes her resistance, not her violation. Kenyan theologian Teresia Hinga observes that “African women’s experience reveals how religious discourse can function as a technology of domination.”

Nevertheless, resistance narratives exist within both scripture and African literature, offering counter-testimonies to patriarchal interpretation. The Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah (Exodus 1:15-21) defy Pharaoh’s genocidal command and are blessed by God for their civil disobedience. Deborah serves as prophet, judge, and military leader (Judges 4-5), exercising authority that later interpreters would claim impossible for women. Mary Magdalene serves as apostle to the apostles, first witness to resurrection (John 20:11-18), though church tradition reduced her to repentant prostitute without biblical basis. Theologian Kwok Pui-lan argues in Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology that “decolonizing biblical interpretation requires attending to these subversive voices.” In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), the character of Aunty Ifeoma models a Catholicism that embraces questioning, education for daughters, and resistance to oppressive authority. She tells her niece Kambili, “You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man,” offering theological resistance rooted in human dignity rather than gendered subordination.

The contemporary challenge, then, is hermeneutical and institutional: how do religious communities retrieve egalitarian impulses within their traditions while dismantling centuries of patriarchal interpretation presented as divine command? Theologian James Cone’s liberation theology insisted that “any interpretation of the gospel that does not begin with the oppressed is not Christian.” Applied to gender, this means centering women’s experience and interpreting scripture through the lens of liberation rather than domination. Galatians 3:28’s declaration that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” offers scriptural warrant for radical equality. In NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), the child protagonist Darling observes the gendered violence around her with clarity adults have learned to rationalize. When her friend Chipo becomes pregnant through rape, it is Chipo who carries shame while her abuser remains unnamed and unpunished. Bulawayo’s narrative refuses to normalize this asymmetry, maintaining moral clarity against systems that excuse male violence while policing female virtue.

Perhaps the time is ripe to consider what South African theologian Denise Ackermann calls “feminist theology of praxis”  not merely reinterpreting texts but transforming institutions and communities. This means religious bodies must actively repent of their complicity in gendered violence and inequality, revising legal codes, ordination requirements, and communal practices to reflect genuine mutuality. It demands reading scripture with what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza terms a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” questioning whose interests interpretations serve. The witness of African women writers – from Ama Ata Aidoo to Chimamanda Adichie, from Flora Nwapa to NoViolet Bulawayo – testifies that women refuse the theological straitjacket of subordination. Their literature becomes itself a form of theological resistance, insisting on women’s full humanity against religious systems that would diminish it. As Tsitsi Dangarembga writes through Tambu’s voice, “The victimization, I saw, was universal… Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things.” This questioning is not apostasy but faithfulness to a God who, as the Psalmist declares, “executes justice for the oppressed” (Psalm 103:6). True divine law cannot systematically privilege half of humanity while oppressing the other; such asymmetry reveals human fingerprints, not divine justice. The work of justice, therefore, is excavating the egalitarian vision buried beneath patriarchal interpretation, allowing it finally to flourish.

The writer is a social commentator