It takes at least two to reproduce (1).

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our
likeness ... So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God
he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and
God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply ..." (Gen 1:26-28)

Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying
"I have produced a man with the help of the LORD". Next she bore his
brother Abel. (Gen 4:1-2)

When Adam had lived for one hundred and thirty years, he became the
father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him
Seth. (Gen 5:3)

Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son
(as was thought) of Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat ... son of Enos,
son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God. (Lk 3:23-4, 38)

In 1991, the first occasion on which public attention, in the UK, was directed to the provision of artificial insemination to a woman without a male partner produced a storm of controversy. (2) Feminist questions about female autonomy and the status of the "nuclear family" intersected with public understandings and misunderstandings of a developing reproductive technology, clearly framed (in the popular press) with a religious discourse that pointed to one or more accounts of divine agency in human production and reproduction. A woman threatened to produce a child without a paternal genealogy; or, a scientist threatened to "play God" by changing the terms on which humanity could be fruitful and multiply; or, wider society threatened to interfere with a parent's exclusive power to choose, name and form a child. On any reading, what was at stake was (whether this was acknowledged or not) more than a single instance of the (re)production of a human being; it was the ways in which a society could (re)produce itself, understand its future, form relationships of responsibility that would sustain it.

Theology has, it is clear, a major investment in the question of what modes of human reproduction are possible (not to mention desirable or normative). So, since its inception, does feminist thought; so do conspicuous contemporary discourses of ethics and politics, particularly in relation to new reproductive technologies. This article is concerned with how the thinking of modes of reproduction plays out in theology and ethics, and with how feminist theologians can or should approach discourses of reproduction.

Jewish and Christian feminist theologians have concerned themselves extensively with the politics both of human reproduction and of its cultural representation. They have had particular reason to do so, not only because of the biblical, halakhic and doctrinal significance accorded to reproduction (in its various modes), but also because of the ways in which narratives of reproduction determine their problematic places as theologising subjects. Christian feminist theologians are trained in patristics, and may seek to counter the influence of the Church Fathers by a search for their own foremothers; they might (as might their Jewish counterparts) define themselves as dissident daughters (3) or wonder what the next generation of theological thinkers will produce. Even when the language of reproduction, descent, parenthood and childhood is not explicitly used, feminist thinkers have discerned the power of underlying structural assumptions about how "reproduction" works to shape how theology relates its past to its future. In particular, they have noted how dominant accounts of reproduction maintain the authorising power of a male tradition.

There is a widespread and not entirely unjustified sense within wider feminist thought that Judaism and Christianity, as monotheistic faiths, are heavily invested in a monogenetic account of cultural reproduction. (4) Monogenesis is the belief that the activity of only one parent, namely the father, is crucial in the production of a child, with the mother functioning merely as the receptacle for the active or formative principle originating from the father--the father who thereby acquires a son in his likeness, according to his image.

In descriptions of human sexual reproduction, "monogenetic" belief might be signalled by imagery such as the sowing of seed in a field, or by biological accounts (Aristotelian or otherwise) depicting the sperm as giving "form" to the "matter" present in the female body. Even with accounts of sexual reproduction that admit the formative contribution of both parents, however, as feminist commentators have pointed out, (5) "monogenetic" patterns of thinking can persist at other levels. Male genealogies can be prioritised, so that children are members of their father's family, inheritors of their father's name and property, symbolic maintainers of his image. Cultural or intellectual history can be traced as the orderly and in some way inevitable succession of lines of "great men" whose heirs "we" are. And religious texts, biblical and traditional, can trace this succession all the way back to the divine Father who needs no other in order to beget his own image perfectly: son of Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat ... son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.

I want to acknowledge the strength of monogenetic thinking within theological accounts of tradition and practices of traditioning--theological relations to the past--and also within at least some theological accounts of relations to the future. At the same time, I want to follow a little way, in feminist and theological thought, the clues to another perspective given in the biblical texts I quoted at the beginning of this article. Adam might be said to have begotten a son in his likeness, according to his image, and with, apparently, no necessary reference to Eve as subject of reproductive work; but Eve had previously claimed to have produced a man with the help of the LORD, in the context of sexual relations with "the man" and in the aftermath of the command, to male and female humanity, to be fruitful and multiply. And then, of course, Jesus was only supposed to be the son of Joseph, the son of Heli, and so forth--Luke's text having previously, at the very least, opened the possibility that he was no such thing. (6)

So these texts do, I suggest, give the basis for a monogenetic account of reproduction to support a "master narrative"; but they also subvert that "master narrative" by an account of the appearance of human beings, and of the image of God, through production from difference. It is this second possibility that I want to trace here, because I believe it offers a way out of some dilemmas in thinking about (re)production that affect both feminist and theological thought.

The mother in feminism and theology

There is now a large body of feminist literature, from a very wide range of academic disciplines, about the denial or obscuring of the mother in accounts of human reproduction that in any way go beyond the family and the origins of the individual. So, for example, feminist sociologists observe the very long section in Marx's Economic and Political Manuscripts on "man's giving birth to himself." Feminist ethicists observe that significant strands in ethical theory (including some earlier feminist ethical theory, particularly that working within the traditions of political liberalism) assumes that everybody worthy of consideration is a fully rational adult, and shows relatively little interest in how they got to that point. Feminist scholars of "patristics" observe, not only that the "Church Fathers" construct themselves as a monogenetic intellectual tradition, but also that their later commentators accept and reinforce this construction. Luce Irigaray is among those whose theoretical work draws together these various strands of critique, portraying the repeated sacrifice of women, and more specifically of mothers, for the sake of the paternal genealogies that shape the West's master narratives.

In this context of feminist critique it is sometimes claimed, by feminist and non-feminist theologians, that religious traditions have the symbolic and textual resources to revalue maternal work and interrupt the monogenetic telling of human reproductive history. Theological reflection throughout the ages has not, of course, entirely ignored the fact that it takes two to reproduce. There has been ample feminist theological analysis of the extent to which, explicitly or implicitly, the question of the meaning of sexual difference has in the past been reduced to the question of the meaning of woman, and resolved to a greater or lesser extent in terms of reproductive capacity. (7) More recently, this thought on the fundamental singificance of sexual difference for human being has been taken up alongside phenomenological accounts of "mothering" or of sexuality. The biblical "fruitfulness" of the male/female pair, and the valorisation of mothers and the maternal within theological tradition, is seen as a significant counterbalance to masculinist accounts of the history of social and cultural reproduction.

As is well known, however, this approach has its own associated problems. "The fruitfulness of the male/female pair"--the claim that it takes two to reproduce--suggests a model of sexual complementarity that, literally and figuratively, domesticates sexual difference. The couple, or the family, may be internally differentiated, but as regards the wider social, political or cultural context--as regards, then, the operation of many of the powerful master narratives--it is for all intents and purposes a single and stable reproductive unit. Eve can, as it were, be recognised for her role as the mother of all living, but can then be restricted to a sphere in which she does not affect the masculine story of the transmission of the image.

Importantly for our purposes, the male/female pair, and/or the parent with the child, has often been used theologically in discussions of what it means for humanity to bear the image of God. (8) For such readings, it is not merely that each human being can individually be called the "image of God"--it is that the relationships between human beings, including relationships of reproduction, are in some way constitutive of their imaging of God. Readings of the Genesis 1 and 3 texts, indeed, can scarcely avoid at least asking about the relationship between the image of God, the creation of humanity as male and female, and the instruction to be fruitful and multiply. The production/reproduction of human beings, linked in these texts to the image of God, already acquires a significance beyond the biological; the texts and the tradition set up a nexus within which images and concepts of human production and reproduction acquire great symbolic force. In what follows, I want to suggest a rereading of the theological-anthropological significance of "reproduction," which has as its correlate a different understanding of how the image of God is produced and reproduced in human life.

Image of God Male and Female

There is a tension here between two well established readings of the Genesis texts on the image of God, which goes to the heart of debates on how human (re)production is to be understood theologically. One reading locates the image of God in male and female existence, so that human orientation to transcendence is located primarily in ethical/erotic encounter with the other. The other locates the image of God, human orientation to transcendence, in the capacity and summons to be fruitful and multiply, to produce and reproduce the human image that is also the image of God ("Adam ... became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image"). (9) The former encourages accounts of sexual difference that prioritise the difference itself over any "productivity" that might arise from it; the latter, accounts that begin with "fruitfulness" as a characteristic of human being as a whole.

The tension between these two accounts of the human imaging of God has its feminist counterpart in debates over the significance that should be accorded to the maternal body and maternal "experience" in feminist politics. It is also the subject of several theological attempts at reconciliation--which, particularly when written from a male perspective, can find the double emphasis on difference and reproduction perfectly reflected in the double function of woman as wife and mother. (10) It is such conservative theological "reconciliations"--which end up denying woman's imaging of God by reducing her to a function of male self-transcendence--that lead me to hypothesise that feminist thought needs a different way out of the discussion, one that will prove theologically significant. Hence the title of this essay: it takes at least two to reproduce.

My hypothesis is that if non-eradicable, non-assimilable difference--discussed here in terms of sexual difference--is integral to human being in the image of God, it is also integral to the production and reproduction of the image of God, and not in a way that reduces to different functions within a single reproductive process, because that would amount to the erasure of significant difference. If breaking out of monogenetic thinking is possible when we are talking about gender and sexual reproduction, it might be possible to do so in wider theological, ethical and political contexts.

I see the need for a view of cultural and social (re)production that would draw attention to the ways in which "products" themselves--not only persons, but also group identities and the narratives that shape them, religious and political systems and the artefacts that define them--carry with them traces of their differentiated and conflicted origins. In theological terms, this means seeing the "image of God", even within the self--and certainly within the community that claims to image God--as appearing in and through the encounter with given and non-assimilable difference through time. (11) Being made "male and female" in the image of God is, on this reading, being made for a project of responsible encounter with, living with, and production of, different human being. This project is still one of production and reproduction, because the human future emerges from it; but the human future thus produced and reproduced is not simply the perpetuation of what is already given. It is a project that cannot be confined to the private or interpersonal sphere in the interests of human (national, cultural, religious) unity on another level; and it is also a project that cannot be short-circuited by declaring a return to some original state of harmony. (12)

Why talk about "at least two" in this context? The language and logic of at least is introduced by Irigaray and taken up (most significantly) by Elizabeth Grosz, in work on the ethical and political significance of sexual difference. It is helpful in indicating, in the first instance, why an insistence on sexual specificity--talk about "female" bodily morphology, experiences, ethics, and so forth--need not lead to the kind of essentialism that closes off further sexually specific differentiation--differences among women, instabilities in the category "woman", perhaps most importantly a multiplicity in the woman's own self. Once there are at least two, in Irigaray's logic, there can be more than two; so the pair does not become a closed pair that can operate as a single unit for the purposes of sustaining a larger narrative of monogenetic production. An Irigarayan reading of Genesis 1:26-28, for example, might say that the image of God lies in the capacity of sexually differentiated humanity not only to "be fruitful" but to "multiply" through their fruitfulness, producing further differences that are not re-incorporated into a single system.

I suggest that feminist and theological accounts of (re)production, and readings of narratives of (re)production, need to maintain an emphasis on "at least two"--and that readings of biblical texts on reproduction can help them do this. In the first place, the language of "at least two" can be introduced to call into question histories of how "we" (or anyone else) came to be where we are that project unitary and non-conflictual--monogenetic--lines of inheritance and succession.

Against readings of scriptures and traditions that emphasise the single narrative, a feminist hermeneutic of suspicion based on the insight that "it takes at least two" will direct attention both to aspects of the conditions of textual production, and to characters within the narrative, that have been "sacrificed" to maintain the fiction of an undifferentiated past. The feminist theological reader can follow the signs in a text towards complexities in (re)productive agency--"the son, as was supposed, of Joseph", "I have produced a man with the help of the LORD"--as a way of drawing attention both to the suppressed complexities of present identity, and the unrealised possibilities of the past that may still have a future.

Repetition of the image

But what do we make, in this context, of the strong presence within this same tradition of what looks like a "monogenetic" pattern--Adam ... became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image? Here I want to suggest, more tentatively, that the logic of "at least two" can usefully be supplemented by attention to the logic of repetition. Paradoxically, the idea that the child is the exact likeness, the repetition, of the father, although at first it sounds like monogenesis, can already set up an instability within the line of transmission. True repetition, as opposed to similarity or conforming to a pattern, we have been reminded in many philosophical contexts, in fact implies the possibility of the new, the unique and the singular. (13) It calls into question chains of causes and effects, and narratives of progress--in which nothing can really come back, because each person or event only "fits" one place in the pattern. A narrative of historical progress tends to require a monogenetic logic, in which each event or person has an obvious predecessor and an equally obvious true successor, and whatever does not fit within this narrative cannot be taken into account. Repetitions, by contrast, open up the possibility of unconnected or non-systemised occurrences. Once there is a repetition, there are "at least two"; there are two in a way that necessarily makes room for more than two, and that makes apparent a context that transcends the two.

So there is a second way to read the plural production of 'adam in the image of God as the basis of continuing responsibility for and to difference--'adam repeats, so 'adam is each time singular. Hence, on this reading, sexual difference is not to be read simply in terms of two sets of characteristics that can be co-ordinated to each other (and that hence form a system that excludes any third, or different, possibility). (14) Hence, also, experiencing and living "common humanity" is perhaps not a matter of recognising similarity--what fits the pattern, what is expected, another example of the "same sort of thing"--but of encountering otherness that cannot easily be kept away by assigning it a place in one's system of thought.

Communities and Reproductions

How does any of this change feminist theological approaches to ethics and politics? In the context of feminist thought about reproduction, the most common challenge to individualistic ethics is the ethic of care, based on the primacy of particular relations of dependence and interdependence. Clearly relationships of care, maternal work and maternal thinking, the dependence of people on one another, and so forth, have ethical importance. In fact, all I have said about difference and its (re)production implies that ethics, including theological ethics, needs to have much to say about the ongoing work of production/reproduction--the "mothering" that monogenetic narratives take for granted, the multiple material and social prerequisites of the emergence of any new identity.

My concern, however, is about what happens when we extend a particularist "ethics of care" to an ethical and theological framework that starts from and prioritises the existence of particular--perhaps family-like--communities with shared narratives of origin and defining characteristics. Again, the point is not to evade the claim that there is no view from nowhere and that the sovereign ethical "subject" is an abstraction. It is, rather, to problematise the "subject" of ethics still further, by drawing attention to the differentiation within the community identity that supposedly grounds his or her discourse. It is to refuse to treat the family, the locality, or even the religious community as a "black box" out of which the sovereign reasoning subject springs fully formed (as in the models of culture condemned by Irigaray, discussed earlier)--but also to refuse to treat it as a single harmonious whole that relates to "the other" as something external to its communal identity. A family or a group that knows that "it takes at least two to reproduce" and is constituted as a project in living with difference is formed from the beginning for openness to the other.

The ideas for this article were first put forward in the context of the work of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, which brings together Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars for shared textual and theoretical work around questions of profound theological, ethical and political concern. One of the significant correlations I see between this developing form of "interfaith" work on the one hand, and feminist theological thought on the other, is that both problematise for ethical and theological reasons the concept of the group representative (with its implication that the voices of a community can be summarised without remainder in the voice of one of its--properly selected--members, and that therefore internal difference or conflict must be resolved or suppressed before the exercise of dialogue can begin). Both feminist theologians and "scriptural reasoners" recognise that to reveal the life of a community--the way in which the image of God dwells within it--is to reveal its multiple origins, its present differences and the many possible futures that are taking shape out of those differences. The "interfaith" work conducted in scriptural reasoning is at the same time work that affects "Jewish", "Christian" and "Muslim" identities.

There is scope here, then, for a significant feminist contribution to the theorising of a range of issues around traditions and their perpetuation, "intercultural" and "interfaith" exchange and its possibilities--and noneof this in abstraction from the material and social conditions of such (re)productive processes.

Notes

1. Or, indeed, to produce an article. Many more than two, in fact. Thanks especially to Randi Rashkover for comments on the draft; and to Alison Stone, Chad Pecknold, Alice E. Wood, and members of the Exeter Department of Theology research seminar for helpful conversations on related topics. Many of the ideas in this article first appeared in a response to papers presented to the Society for Scriptural Reasoning in November 2003--see a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning.

2. On which see Steph Lawler, Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 150-2.

3. The title of a collection of feminist liturgies: Teresa Berger, ed., Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).

4. For two feminist accounts of "monogenesis" and its relation to monotheism, from different disciplinary contexts, see Denise Kimber Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton University Press, 1999); Carol Delaney, "The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate", Man 21 (1986), 494-513.

5. Even at levels very close to the "scientific"; see Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics (Lodnon, Routledge, 1997), on the persistence in medical and popular literature of images of the maternal body that treat it as passive receptacle of the male seed.

6. Delaney, "The Meaning of Paternity", assumes that virgin birth and paternal monogenesis are closely linked--but this seems prima facie illogical. Rather more logical, in fact, is Sojourner Truth's approach (as recorded in Frances Gage's account of her speech to the Seneca Falls Convention)--"Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him ... "As, famously, in Aquinas' discussion of why another man was not created as the "helpmate" for Adam: "It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a "helper" to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation" (Summa Theologica 1/92/1).

7. For humanity male and female as "image of God" see (perhaps most influentially) Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3/1, p. 106ff.

8. See for discussions of both of these alternatives the papers by Steve Kepnes and Kurt Anders Richardson in the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 4/2, forthcoming.

9. Claire Elise Katz, Levinas, Judaism and the Feminine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) discusses the double significance of "the feminine" in Levinas' work in these terms. In Christian theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of the duality of "woman" is famous or notorious--Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3.

10. I am grateful to Susannah Ticciati for conversations around this idea.

11. There is good theological sense here in the feminist riposte to Galatians 3:28: "It may be the case that in Christ there is neither male nor female, but it is not true anywhere else". Read slightly against the grain, it prompts the recognition, already suggested in reading Genesis, that visions of unity achieved by ignoring, suppressing or denying non-assimilable human difference are precisely not visions of the perfected image of God.

12. The key discussion of "repetition" for recent philosophy is of course in the work of Deleuze--see Difference and Repetition (Paul Patton trans., London: Athlone, 1994).