Caitlin Olsen
Thursday, 20 November 2025
Katherine Abetz, The Metaphor of Gender: Indenty in a Sacramental Universe. Resource Publications, 2025. 336 pages.
Katherine Abetz’s The Metaphor of Gender: Identity in a Sacramental Universe appropriates images from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to examine gender’s dynamism as a metaphor for Divine and human realities and relationships. Abetz responds, here and in her 2022 text The Wizard’s Illusion, to feminist theologian Sallie McFague’s description of metaphor as ‘projection’, using an Ozian metaphor: the ‘green glasses’ that render in Emerald an otherwise bleak metropolis. But where McFague limits metaphor’s linguistic efficacy to a ‘useful fiction’, Abetz sniffs the power of Oz’s Poppy Field to drowsily decouple metaphor from reality, instead placing her confidence in metaphor’s linguistic efficacy – its sacramentality – to undergird her primary question: ‘what does it mean for women to be made in the image of God?’
Abetz shares an Ozian genealogy not only with McFague, but also with one of the biggest cinema blockbusters of the last few years: Wicked, adapted from a musical (itself adapted from a book) that re-stories Oz around Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West. The very model of a (post)modern Broadway musical, Wicked ironically deconstructs the symbols that have accumulated around the Witch over the century that she has existed in public imagination. Yet Abetz perceives the destabilisation of symbolic meaning that made Wicked so popular as dangerously departing from sacramental methods for understanding God, gender, and how the twain meet.
Rather than pledging allegiance to any one of her many theological ‘travelling companions’ at risk of finding herself in the Poppy Field or the ‘Swamp of Ambiguity’ (Abetz’s own invention), Abetz pledges only to her governing metaphor, the ‘Yellow Brick Road’, which symbolises language’s ‘ability to point to its referent’ (p. 175). For Abetz, this extends beyond mundane sound-object relations; the universe’s signs, symbols and metaphors are ‘essentially theological’ (p. 24). If Abetz’s Yellow Brick Road exclusively guarantees safe passage between a metaphor’s vehicle and its tenor, then speaking of the sensuously saturated Oz and its concomitant metaphors engenders also speaking of mundane, monochrome Kansas.
If you wish to venture into Oz with Abetz, trade your ruby slippers for grippy sneakers and your feminist manifestos for a map. The Metaphor of Gender constitutes over 300 pages of dense engagement with a slew of feminist theologians and philosophers. While answers to Abetz’s initial question may bless the whole priesthood of believers, finding them amidst these pages seems achievable only to those trained for the task. Even the most celebrated of Abetz’s ‘travelling companions’ regularly disappear mid-skip from the Yellow Brick Road and find themselves, by Abetz’s reckoning, in one of Oz’s more slippery locations. While Abetz dialogues with other thinkers deeply and diversely, one cannot help but feel as if she demands the last word, even if that last word is a brief undermining question followed by a paragraph break.
Abetz covers impressive swathes of territory to explain her method. Chapter one establishes her on the Road, notably its commitment to the ‘hegemony’ of ‘Father’ as metaphor for God, whose ‘demythologisation’ comes from a ‘feminist impetus’ (p. 20, 25). While Abetz does not define what ‘demythologisation’ involves, it appears that she understands ‘myth’ as ‘received meaning’, saying that God-as-Father spills from a patriarchal ‘upwards’ projection of male attributes onto God necessitates ‘wandering off the Road’ and forfeiting any meaning in the statement that ‘women are made in the image of God’. Gender, as received meaning from God, says something about God. Abetz’s method guarantees an answer to her question, but at the expense of McFague and her co-conspirators disappearing into the Swamp.
In chapter two, Abetz explores allegorical method through both Elizabeth A. Johnson’s feminist lens and Augustine’s traditional lens, unsurprisingly consigning Johnson to the Swamp via the millstone of feminist assumptions. Abetz more thoroughly explores Augustine’s location of imago Dei in masculine and feminine ‘principles of mind’. The sexed body allegorises these gendered functions, which Augustine maintains both manifest in all humans, male and female. But to support her adaptation of Augustine’s method, Abetz requires another binary distinction between McFague’s ‘green glasses’ and her own ‘green fingers’, defined somewhat elusively as a ‘kind of knowing which recognizes its “Other”’ (p. 59). The greenness, the meaning, is not in the fingers (nor in the glasses), but in what they reach for. And it is the reaching for the Other – the sapientia – that characterises masculinity, with femininity its contingent other. This is the closest Abetz comes to defining ephemeral ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as distinct categories from the visible ‘male’ and ‘female’. I confess that, at this point in the book, respite in the Poppy Field seemed appealing.
Fortunately, chapters three and four comfortingly ground Abetz’s approach in scripture as a received literary symbol. Abetz argues that knowing the likeness between ‘copy’ (imago) and ‘archetype’ (Dei) in a sacramental universe requires first knowing their difference. Here, Abetz locates two gendered instances of Divine ‘analogy’ in scripture: the human ‘male and female’ pair of Genesis 1:27 corresponding to some divine masculine and feminine (the Lord and Lady Wisdom), and a human pair (Jesus and Mary) paralleled with a divine masculine and a human feminine (Christ and the Church). Notably, Abetz finds no inversion of the latter structure.
Abetz renders these masculine-feminine relationships in chapters five and six by exegeting the ha’adam (Genesis’s primeval human) and the imago Dei, respectively. She fends off arguments for a non-gendered version of either concept, based on exegetical and historical data for eschatological sexual difference. Gender, to Abetz, expresses interpersonal relationship at the human, human-divine, and divine levels with likeness and difference, stability and fluidity… and thus offers glimpses of Triune relationship. While differences between men and women exceed merely sexed embodiment, gender stereotypes do not represent the horizon for those differences; sacramental roles do. In a winsome excursus at the ‘heart of this book’ (p. 199), Abetz winsomely paints her theological point not in Oz’s Emerald, but in Regency pastels via Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (and C.S. Lewis’ commentary). She uses a ballroom scene where Mr. Darcy inspires a dialogue that contrasts rational, civil, ‘even-keeled’ conversation with the dynamism and role-reversal of a dance. Trinitarian theology’s commitment to perichoresis (mutual divine interplay) insists that God’s interpersonal relationships much better resemble a dance than mere dialogue. Abetz seems to soften here; it is at this plush point, far from the yellow bricks, that her theology seems most generative.
The final four chapters feel like returning from the Emerald City along the same Road. Abetz resumes spotting not only feminist theologians among the Poppies and the Swamp, but also Augustine and Barth. Abetz shares many feminist theologian’s fears that the female body has been ‘flattened’ by linguistic forces – much as a Scarecrow’s whose straw has been rearranged – but identifies the same ‘flattening’ in much feminist method. Abetz resolves this by offering the embodied Christ who ‘clothes’ the Church as a gender-inclusive, yet still masculine in posture, connection between Divine and human. Abetz leans back against her Augustinian assertion that masculinity and femininity are not confined to male and female bodies respectively, clarifying that that the noun of binary sexual difference (man and woman) gives rise to these adjectival roles (masculine and feminine) within a sensible Divine-human relational framework. For her, this is represented sacramentally in the male priesthood and the female childbearer, without requiring every member of their respective sex to perform each role.
Abetz summarises, with the help of Ricoeur, that the received imago Dei offers humanity a ‘narrative identity’ that realises social gender relations, embodiment, and sexual difference. While consistent with the ethos of evangelical theology, this is where Abetz’s analytics leaves a practical lacuna. Creation may well be sacramental, but trying to rouse it to a self-conscious sacramentality requires negotiating more than just the Deadly Poppy Field. While Abetz denounces McFague’s ‘green glasses’ approach, one wonders if her telescopic vision blinds her to how sin might irremovably colour human vision. Abetz organises gender as a horizontal priority rather than vertical hierarchy; masculine and feminine don’t stack, but speak, one body reaching towards another. But the gravity that ‘flattens’ a body, Scarecrow-like, underneath others, proves difficult to resist. The Metaphor of Gender makes a bold attempt to counterbalance this gravity with the stability of the Yellow Brick Road. While Abetz’s method might feel like madness to mere mortals, her context proves instructive; both The Wizard’s Illusion and The Metaphor of Gender spring from her doctoral dissertation, inspired by the Uniting Church in Australia’s historical discourse regarding women’s ordination. Abetz’s choice of certain travelling companions, even the Ozian metaphor, reflects a nostalgia stuck outside the orbit of much contemporary scholarship.
Furthermore, Abetz seems far more approachable in the register of her dissertation (or even the Regency setting) than the Wizard-like amplification of the Ozian metaphor. While she departs from the Wizard in committing to keeping her feet on the bricks, she forgets that in Baum’s world, the Wizard himself stands at the centre of her governing metaphor: the ‘man behind the curtain’ built the Road. If the (sacramental) metaphor follows, then the Wizard of Oz and the Triune God come too close for theological comfort, betraying Abetz’s commitment to the Ozian setting as risking the suck of the Swamp.
Human metaphors succumb to ‘gravity’; they collapse when taken too seriously and die when taken for granted. While denouncing a metaphorical theology, Abetz has taken metaphor seriously. But without qualifying the ‘is’ and ‘is-not’ that transposes the categories of male and female into a cogent (if vacillating) masculinity and femininity, one wonders whether this metaphor for the Divine rejoices only once a Kansas house has squished a Witch.
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