1 Coming Closer to the Cross: New Feminist Perspectives on the Passion of Jesus 1 Marian Ronan Over the past thirty-five years, feminists have been among the most vocal critics of the cross of Christ as a symbol of violence and victimization. In 1975, even before she became a feminist, Dorothee Soelle strongly criticized what she perceived as the sadism of Jurgen Moltmann’s theology of the cross, as expressed in his classic work, The Crucified God. 2 In the decades since then, some feminist theologians have built on Soelle’s objections because the cross seems to them to represent a God who demands the victimization and abuse of human beings. It is worth noting, however, that Soelle herself never rejected the cross as a symbol of the sorrow and suffering of the oppressed. In my own country, the United States, theologians Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock have been two of the most passionate and articulate feminist critics of the cross as a symbol of violence and abuse. In their 2001 book, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, Brock and Parker tell their own stories to illustrate the ways that the cross has been used to 1 This article is the revision of a talk delivered in Zurich, Switzerland in January, 2008, sponsored by the Protestant Academy at Boldern. Special thanks to Tania Oldenhage, then director of theological programs at Boldern, for critical comments on that talk. 2 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 1975); Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God : The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Even in the original edition of Suffering in which she critiqued "Christian masochism," Soelle retained the cross as a figure through which Christians come into solidarity with all those who suffer. Glenn R. Bucher, Review of Suffering by Dorothee Soelle, Theology Today 33.3 (October 1976). http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1976/v33-3-bookreview2.htm (Accessed June 6, 2009). The title of another of Soelle’s books, Stations of the Cross: A Latin American Pilgrimage (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) suggests that Soelle still found the cross an important figure for Christians nearly twenty years later.