Feminist Theology Research Paper

In the interest of transforming power relations, feminist theology works both to deconstruct the androcentric religious imagination, its philosophical underpinnings and its socio-political incarnations, and to construct or to create livable, religious imaginals that shelter the cultural becoming of women and that generate the formation of open, just and egalitarian communities. The term feminist theology, broadly defined, may include women’s re invention of goddess and wiccan traditions, critical reconstruction of the world religions, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, as well as women’s philosophical, nontheistic, or spiritualist departures from them.

1. Philosophical Background

Philosophically speaking, feminist theology developed in response to the ‘deracination’ (Daly 1984) of women’s lives within the scope of patriarchal, monotheistic religions. Deracination names the effect on women of those religions whose engagement with ‘the transcendent’ subliminally assumes an abjection of matter—from the Latin ‘mater’ meaning mother (Kristeva 1982). Inasmuch as Platonic philosophy— which radically split spirit from matter, while aligning ‘man’ with enspirited mindfulness and ‘woman’ with (fallen or corrupted) nature—has served as infrastructure for the western monotheistic religions, women have been engendered theologically as devoid of spirit. As a sexual and reproductive body, woman was subjugated to male authority, e.g., wife to husband, daughter to father, penitent to male priest, etc. Additionally inlaid with Aristotle’s hierarchical ‘chain of being,’ western religions granted men greater ontological status and the privilege, therefore, of ruling over women, animals and earth—all of which, given their assumed passive and receptive contours, awaited man’s invigorating agential influence. Built upon the story of man’s ‘second birth’ into the transcendent realms, a birth without resort to woman, these religions idealized male selfhood and generated essentially homosocial cultures (Irigaray 1985). These religions libidinally installed an androcentric sociopolitical and economic matrix which feminists named ‘patriarchy,’ because all ‘goods’ (in terms of values and political rights as well as economics) were circulated through the generations of the fathers and sons. Consequently, women within the purview of these religions have been, as philosopher Daly put it, ‘physically, mentally, and emotionally separated from our Original, elemental Race …’ (1984). That is, women have been religiously precluded from exercising historical agency on behalf of ourselves as women and on behalf of the culture at large.

Androcentric religions have in various ways instilled in women a sense of self-loathing, existential shame and fear of autonomy. In Christianity, e.g., women have been blamed for all frustrations with the flesh, rationalized as the consequence of Eve’s eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3). According to the normative reading of this story, one woman’s exercise of free will ontologically fractured and debased the world, bringing death, disease, suffering, and transience. Since the fleshy body has been viewed as the inheritance of the mother; and since woman has been viewed as a derivative of man (Genesis 2, 1 Corinthians 11:8), Christianity disavowed the flesh and imagined salvation as a resurrection of ‘the (ideal or imaginal) body’ freed from the ‘bondage’ of development and decay, death, disease, and sexual desire (Romans 8). Not only do women thus serve as social scapegoats for Christianity, women have been the physical buffers between the projects generated by ‘man’s self-infinitizing spirit’ (Ruether 1983) and the material impingements of finitude. That is, by socially domesticating women, men withhold from the purview of culture the needs and delimitations of physical bodies, including ‘bodies’ of land, water, etc.

2. Theoretical Contours

Insomuch as the women’s movement initially understood itself to be a ‘spiritual’ movement (Christ and Plaskow 1979, Spretnak 1994), feminist theology could be said to have been inherent to feminism. Women’s exclusion from societal power structures was, feminists surmised, fundamentally linked to women’s exclusion from socio-religious symbol systems. As Daly observed wryly, where ‘God is male, the male is God’ (1985b)—a sentiment seconded by Spretnak, who observed that ‘(t)he long-standing justification in Western culture for regarding the male as the norm … has been the implicit acknowledgement that men are the same sex as God’ (1994). This insight into the culturally constitutive nature of the religious imagination, a critique supported by Feuerbach’s definition of religion as projection (The Essence of Christianity 1957), led feminist theologians to attempt to interrupt the cultural absolute of male sociopolitical power by displacing male religious images and by interrupting their sacred storylines. (Consequent to this insight and owing to feminists’ own interest in ‘changing the divine subject’ so as to authorize women’s power thereby, women’s theological enterprise has sometimes been named ‘feminist thealogy’—‘thea-’ being the feminine of the Greek masculine ‘theo-,’ meaning ‘God.’ See Goldenberg (1979).) Given the incarnational relation between religious symbol and cultural power relations, among feminist theologians’ first tasks was the critique of the masculine images by which religions have referred to the sacred as God, Father, Lord, King, Son, etc., and to humanity as ‘sons’ or ‘men of God.’ Not only do such images exclude women as religious and political subjects, these images—feminist theologians were convinced—led to the abuse and violation of women and children. ‘Women’s experience,’ feminist theology’s epistemological locus, referred to women’s shared experiences of living under the purview of this exclusive male engendering of power. Specifically, such images religiously legitimated the practice of dominative power in relation to all that the system conversely objectified. Hence, women experienced this ‘dominion of God’ as ‘domination’—specifically as battering, rape, poverty, the dislocation and domestication of our lives, etc.

Citing instead texts such as Genesis 1:27 (‘So God created humankind in (God’s) image, … male and female …’), Galatians 3:28 (In Christ, ‘there is no longer male and female …’), and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit upon ‘all flesh’ (Joel 2, Acts 2), feminists asserted women’s unmediated relationship to the sacred, claiming thereby women’s theological authority, the validity of women’s spiritual experience, and the theological subject matter of women’s daily lives. Authorized by Spirit, feminist theologians began a critique of male clerical and ecclesiastical leadership, of the male authorship and interpretation of the canon, of the functional closure of revelation vis-a-vis the sacred canon. Feminist theology not only supported, but was identified actively with the Women–Church movement and the movement for women’s ordination—accomplished in Reformed Judaism as well as within many Protestant (e.g., Presbyterian, Lutheran, American Baptist, United Methodist) and Anglican–Episcopal Christian circles. Yet the problem for women in the religions of ‘the sacred book’ remained: sacred texts have been written by and for men and have circulated for centuries in closed circuits of male interpreters. Where females did appear in these texts, feminists soon surmised that men had ‘used (these) women to think with’ (Karen King). Further, the religious sacraments of these communities have often worked to delegitimate even that which was prescribed as ‘women’s work,’ e.g., in the church birthing becomes baptism, feeding becomes eucharist. Faced with the question of whether sacred texts and existing religious institutions had the symbolic resources to promote women’s well- being, some women, beginning in the early 1970s and onward, have left and invested themselves in the recovery of goddess and wiccan spiritualities, traditions which have supported human embodiment (Eller 1993). Among those women who (also) stayed related to the existing monotheistic religions, a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ was employed to generate a critical distance from canonical texts. By invoking ‘suspicion,’ Biblical scholar Schussler-Fiorenza discouraged women from expecting to discover truth ‘in’ a text conceived by men and encouraged feminists instead to deduce the ‘truth’ of scripture by a text’s ability to raze systems of domination and exploitation (1984). Another feminist strategy for creating an authority base has been the recovery of the hidden histories of women, both in canonical texts, e.g., Wire’s rhetorical positioning of Paul’s otherwise anonymous discursants as The Corinthian Women Prophets (1990), and in Christian communities through- out the centuries, e.g., Ruether and McLaughlin’s Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (1979). Nevertheless, Trible’s Texts of Terror (1984) reminded feminists that, given the patterns of ‘inferiority, subordination and abuse of the female in ancient Israel and the early church’ (3), e.g., Hagar, Tamar, and the daughter of Jephthah, women’s tragic stories do not always yield to a positivist reconstructive resolution. Along with the recuperative labor of feminist Biblical and historical theologians, women have attempted to re-imagine the sacred, a project that has outraged some denominational leaders and led to heresy charges against some women. First, recovering feminine images of the divine from scripture, e.g., Sophia, Wisdom, Spirit, feminists have then applied themselves to rethinking ritual and theology based upon these images. Among academic theologians, McFague’s (1987) Models of God developed the metaphors of God as Mother, Lover, and Friend so as to promote a change of consciousness—from a consciousness founded upon the theological notion of transcendence as separation from and ascendance over women and nature, towards a consciousness of belonging to the ‘evolutionary ecosystem of our cosmos’ (9). In She Who Is Johnson (1992), proposed a Christian trinitarian model of Spirit–Sophia, Jesus–Sophia and Mother–Sophia—a constructive project aimed at thinking women into the economy of divine love, while also thinking divine sociality in terms of the lives of women.

As feminist theology developed, feminists, observing that traditional theology reflected only men’s spiritual experience, undertook a reconstruction of the central doctrines of their respective communities. Whereas Christian theology had, following Augustine, psychically repressed the corporeal body, senses, emotions, and relations, feminists made the body— women’s minds, wills, desires, and relationships—the central site of revelatory encounter and salvific experience. Whereas God had been conceived as absolutely transcendent, feminists have insisted on divine immanence—hence, the transition from invoking the divine as ‘God’ to ‘Spirit.’ Similarly, if according to the androcentric imagination creation was said to have transpired by divine fiat or to have come about through artisanal handicraft, i.e., God as ‘Creator’ or ‘Maker,’ feminists have spoken of the divine ‘birthing’ the world, of the world as ‘God’s Body’ (McFague 1993, Jantzen 1984) and of humans as cocreators of cosmic process.

Finally, whereas for Christians Jesus’ crucifixion has been seen historically as the occasion for sacrificial grace entering in to right a recalcitrant and wayward world, feminists have questioned positioning a human injustice as an ontological necessity and have gravitated toward two other views. First, feminists, rather than memorializing a unique individual from the historical past, reconstrued christology as the prophetic practice of justice and egalitarian relations within the on-going Jesus-community. Second, some feminists have shifted the christological focus away from crucifixion and towards incarnation. The use of the incarnational metaphor, pervasive in contemporary feminist philosophical theory, resonates with the histories of Christian women who have asserted their subjective agency in and through this analog, e.g., Prous Boneta and Guglielma of Milan (Ruether and McLaughlin 1979).

3. Context And History Of Development

While prefigured by the late nineteenth century feminists (e.g., Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible 1895), ‘feminist theology’ refers to the theological critique and reconstruction of religious symbols and systems over the past four decades of the women’s movement (1960s–1990s). Initial publications by SchusslerFiorenza and Daly took place in Europe (1968), where they had worked with other early European feminists, including Catherina Halkes. By the early 1970s, Schussler-Fiorenza and Daly re turned to the United States where they joined the scene that included Rosemary Ruether, Letty Russell, and Judith Plaskow. Women’s theological writing swelled during the 1970s and 1980s with publication’s such as Daly’s Beyond God the Father (1985a) and Pure Lust (1984), Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk (1983) and SchusslerFiorenza’s In Memory of Her (1983).

As feminist theory became conscious of the contextual situatedness of knowledge, feminist theology was refracted increasingly through the differences of all who had been forced together under the universalization of history’s anonymous ‘other,’ ‘woman.’ Inasmuch as ‘women’s experience’ was invoked as the epicenter of feminist theology in the 1970s, and inasmuch as this category was—women soon learned—dependent upon contextual, ethnic, class, and race factors, feminist theology in the 1980s became pluralized. Written now as feminist theologies, the term recognized the distinctive liberative agendas of women of color.

African–American women, protesting that feminist calls for ‘sisterhood’ glossed over black–white racism and the double oppression of race and gender, gleaned the name ‘womanist’ from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. If feminists read with suspicion, womanists—Delores Williams suggested—read with an eye toward survival; she found the epitome of the black woman survivor in Hagar (1993). Womanists’ theological reflection often incorporates black women’s literature, especially that of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall, womanists having found in this literary canon models more relevant to the goal of improving black women’s quality of life.

As differences continued to refract, Hispanic women like Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz wrote Mujerista Theology (1996). The indigenous voice of Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop (1986) interrupted any too facile linkage of North America with the Christian continent. Jewish women resisted the supercessionist imperialism of Christian women (Plaskow 1990). From the beginning, lesbian voices have checked Christianity and Judaism’s too facile heterosexist perspectives (e.g., Carter Heyward 1989 Touching Our Strength).

As with women of color in North America, women’s theology in the densely populated and economically poorer nations has had to address survival needs and has often been undertaken without standing against men, who may consider the gender question secondary to the community’s goal of liberation from neocolonism. Significant voices from feminist theology in global perspective include Mercy Amba Oduyoye from Ghana, Kwok Pui-Lan of Hong Kong, Chung Hyun-Kyung from South Korea, Mary John Mananzan of the Philippines, Ivone Gebarra from Brazil and Elsa Tamez from Costa Rica. Women from the nations evangelized by the western religions have come more recently to celebrate the hybridity of their religious subjectivity. The recovery of indigenous traditions—some of which, like Korean shamanism, claim stronger spiritual leadership roles for women— have become significant factors in creating out of the received religious tradition a vital and practical religious syncretism (Chung, Hyun Kyung 1990 Struggle to be the Sun Again).

In summary, the pluralization of ‘woman’ lead to distinct feminist theologies. Questions remain as to whether ‘feminist’ can serve as a canopy or whether such a move asks women of color to submit to the universalism of white, western experience. Though European theologians, e.g., Dorothee Soelle and Luise Schottroff, have—given greater impetus by their proximity to socialist analysis—included more economic reflections, feminist theology in general has not done as well at critiquing class as race issues. If feminist theology initially was configured by uniting women around victimization, increasingly feminist theologies have attempted to build constructively around women’s shared goals. Parallel to this, a significant shift in the energies of feminist theologies can be felt—a move away from the ensconcing of opposition, especially ‘resistance,’ a position still within the logic of dualism; a move towards a ‘nonapocalyptic’ feminism, employing a ‘methodological ambivalence’ to sift through the ‘power lines’ so as to transform cultures (Catherine Keller 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then).

4. Probable Directions

In her 1975 book New Woman New Earth, Ruether noted that ‘(s)exism and ecological destructiveness are related in the symbolic patterns of patriarchal consciousness …’ The disclosure of this symbolic connection between women’s oppression and the domination of the earth led to the ecofeminist theology of the 1990s. If the collections of ecofeminist essays are indicative (e.g., Adams), ecological concern may convene an even greater diversity of feminist theologians—including women activists from Buddhism, Hinduism, and indigenous religions worldwide. Since women’s bodies have served as buffer from life’s material impingements for those who believe in the extraterrestrial transcendence of androcentric religions; and, inasmuch as ecosystemic collapses from industrial, agricultural, and multinational industries appear to be increasing, women—who, according to UN statistics, perform two-thirds of the human work hours, receive 10 percent of the pay, and own less than 1 percent of the world’s habitable land—will be increasingly adversely impacted (Progress for Half the World’s People in issues of the 1980s by the UN Association of the US 1980). Insofar as feminist theologies remain orthopraxic, i.e., committed to good practice, rather than correct belief (‘orthodoxy’), a burgeoning of ecofeminist theologies might be expected.

Further, a new interest in the sciences could revitalize a certain stream of feminist theology. In the 1980s, the articulation of a relational ontology, undergirded with the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, lead to the process-oriented theologies of Rita Nakashima Brock, Catherine Keller, Marjorie Suchocki, and Sheila Devaney, among others. More recently, feminist philosophers of science, e.g., Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway, and Vandana Shiva, have been critiquing Christianity’s influence upon western scientific paradigms. Given this alliance of interest, feminist theologians might be expected to further the deconstruction of Western Christian mythemes in hopes of interrupting the planetary destructiveness of current and envisioned biotechnologies. At the same time, feminist theologians could be expected—given the fertile overlap between the new physics and theology—to offer new cosmological articulations.

In the 1990s, feminist theology took on a decidedly philosophical hue. To be sure, women like Daphne Hampson (England) and Daly, convinced that Christianity was and would remain inherently patriarchal, dated themselves ‘post-Christian.’ Consequent to that move, Daly insisted that she wrote philosophy, not theology. However, for those who continue to work within the sacred texts and traditions of Christianity and Judaism, postmodern discourse—heralding the end of totalizing worldviews and the disappearance of the subject—has caused feminist theology—like feminist theory, upon which it is dependent—to rethink its critical terms. While both a totalizing worldview, i.e., ‘patriarchy,’ and the evocation of female subjectivity had been used to achieve feminism’s early liberative goals, this new philosophically reflective stage should not be seen necessarily as a departure from feminist theology’s commitment to political transformation. Increasingly, postcolonial theory—especially in the field of Biblical studies—and deconstruction are being used to revitalize or reshape liberative theologies. Sharon Welch modeled the viability of employing post-structuralism on behalf of emancipatory transformation in her 1985 Communities of Resistance and Solidarity as did Rebecca Chopp in her 1989 The Power to Speak. More recently, the French psychoanalytic and poststructuralist insights of Kristeva and Irigaray have been used as hermeneutical tools to address topics such as eucharist, belief, the incarnation, spirit, etc. (Kim et al. 1993). Nevertheless, whether or not this philosophical tone might— amidst the transformation of other critical terms, e.g., the divine, transcendence, belief, etc.—represent a reconsideration of what counts as theology remains an unarticulated and therefore unanswered question for the field.

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