Feminist Christian Encounters

The Methods and Strategies of Feminist Informed Christian Theologies

Angela Pears

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815389002
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Originally published in 2004. Feminist discourses have focused sustained and sometimes devastating critical attention on Christianity over the last fifty years. Today feminisms remain significant but often ambiguous forces in contemporary Christian theology. At a time in which questions about the success and viability of feminisms are increasingly posed, Feminist Christian Encounters makes a unique contribution to the ongoing investigation into the creative relationship between feminisms and Christianity. Angela Pears identifies some of the key theological and methodological mechanisms by which Christian feminist theologies are informed, sustained, and made possible by feminist values and critiques. Pears argues that certain strategies characterize the facilitation of this dialogue in contemporary Christian feminist theologies, enabling theologians to accept the values and critiques of feminisms whilst at the same time proclaim some level of commitment to Christianity. Engaging in a process of deconstruction of the methodologies of key Christian theological thinkers who have made use of feminisms in their theologies, this book reveals the mechanisms of feminist Christian encounter at work.

Chapter One
The Contours of Christian Feminist Theologies

Introduction

In exploring the identity of Christian feminist theologies it is helpful to place the emergence and subsequent development of these theologies into some kind of historical perspective in order to establish an overall framework for analysis. The cultural, social and religious contexts out of which such theologies arose bear testimony to the shape and motivations of these theologies and so hold important clues to understanding their subsequent development and contemporary forms. But also, and perhaps more importantly here, an historical overview gives some sense of any stages or key moves which mark out the process of feminist Christian encounters, and especially early feminist Christian encounters. However, despite the benefits of such a mapping out project, historical perspectives on feminisms and feminist theologies are not easily established. Attempts to represent them accordingly into some kind of clear chronological order often remain at best ambiguous, if not actually misleading and problematic. The gendered silences of recorded history and the dangers of imposing inappropriate definitions and readings on women's experiences mean that the task of locating the historical beginnings of feminist theologies is uncertain and questionable for a number of reasons. Feminist historians and critics claim that the processes of recording history have largely been influenced, if not wholly determined by dominant male group perspectives and interests. So, the experiences, interests and achievements of women have not been recorded in the same way as male experiences and neither have they been given their appropriate place in cultural, social, political and religious history. As such, access to women's history, and to historical perspectives on feminisms, face many obstacles. As Pam Hirsch notes, "Women's lives and women's histories often look different, more diffuse and are (perhaps) harder to evaluate".¹ There is a need to avoid over-simplifying and homogenising the diverse experiences of women in order to present feminisms and feminist theologies into some kind of unified and coherent system, which is a tendency that has so far often proved irresistible and highly destructive, and in many ways has stifled the promise of feminisms and feminist theologies to the extent that some would even contend that it has lead to the end of feminisms as potentially liberative discourse or transformative social action. So, any attempt to locate something as fluid and evasive as "feminisms" or "feminist theologies" is inevitably challenging and potentially problematic. Also, it is possible to argue that there have always been individuals and groups who have displayed what might now be described as a "feminist" approach to religion and theology, and as such there might be said to be a long and substantial tradition of "feminist theologies". So, in this sense, talk of "beginnings" can clearly be misleading and even inaccurate. Given these factors, the task of identifying the "beginnings of feminist theologies" needs careful qualification and needs to be accompanied by a critical appreciation of the difficulties faced. Tension needs to be held throughout any such study between the need to uncover critically motivations and developments which shaped the emergence of feminisms and feminist theologies and the dangers of representing them in a unified whole. Also, any attempt to map out Christian feminist encounters is inevitably partial and selective.

Early Christian feminist encounters

The emergence of feminisms as discernible theological perspectives shadows the rise of feminisms generally. Like the wider feminist movement, feminist theologies are largely understood to have developed in two main impulses, the first in the late nineteenth century and the second beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. Evidence for the emergence of feminist theologies, in their first phase, is often located with a number of key nineteenth-century writings which are variously celebrated as either heralding or anticipating feminist consciousness, Matilda Joslyn Gage's Woman, Church and State² (1893) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible³ (1895) are two such texts. Stanton and Gage, along with Susan B. Anthony, were influential figures in the nineteenth-century women's movement in North America and were involved with justice related issues of suffrage, temperance, anti-slavery, the ERA and especially women's rights. As part of their commitment to the promotion of justice, Stanton and Gage gave detailed attention to the causes and sites of gender based inequalities. In the process of such analysis they were particularly critical of the role of Christianity in establishing and perpetuating such injustices. For example, in Woman, Church and State Gage located considerable responsibility for gender based oppression with the Christian Church and raised a number of key issues surrounding questions of equality and hope, many of which have featured prominently in feminist theologies since. These focused on issues of priesthood, celibacy and marriage, the possibility and promises of matriarchal societies, and the apparently different codes of morality for men and women advocated by society. The challenges facing the Church, according to Gage were fundamental questions of human existence:

The most important struggle in the history of the church is that of woman for liberty of thought and the right to give that thought to the world. As a spiritual force the church appealed to barbaric conception when it declared woman to have been made for man, first in sin and commanded to be under obedience. Holding as its chief tenet a belief in the inherent wickedness of woman, the originator of sin, as its sequence the sacrifice of a God becoming necessary, the church has treated her as alone under a "curse" for whose enforcement it declared itself the divine instrument. Woman's degradation under it dating back to its earliest history, while the nineteenth century still shows religious despotism to have its stronghold in the theory of woman's inferiority to man.⁴

Gage argued that doctrinal and theological authority legitimised and enforced various gender based oppressions of women, with the effect that women were seen as inherently sinful and morally inferior to men. The implication of Gage's analysis was that religious authority has been used to validate and sustain a gendered hierarchical anthropology and theology. Religion, and in particular Christianity (given Gage's own cultural and religious heritage) were not seen as incidental to gender based oppression but as a central causal factor.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, like Gage, was an activist and was involved with planning the first women's rights convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. She too was committed to opposing perceived inequalities of women's lives and as part of this identified the particular significance of the Bible as a tool to silence and marginalise women. Her methodology was one of biblical exploration and analysis and in many ways her work anticipated the extensive critical feminist hermeneutics that have been such a shaping and highly visible aspect of the challenging presence of feminism in Christian theology over the last 35 years. For some such feminist informed biblical scholarship constitutes the most challenging if not threatening aspect of feminist Christian encounter. In the two volume work, The Woman's Bible, which emerged in 1895 and 1898, Stanton drew on contemporary insights of biblical scholarship and questioned the role of the Bible in supporting and sustaining historical and contemporary gender based oppression facing women. Stanton's project involved the systematic exegesis of biblical texts from a consciously woman identified stance:

From the inauguration of the movement for women's emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in the "divinely ordained sphere", prescribed in the Old and New Testaments.

...The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgement seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjugation, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home. Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.⁵

According to Stanton, historically the Bible had been employed to silence, control and blame women for sin and death, and very significantly, marriage and maternity were seen as the outcome or condition of sin. So, the Bible locates blame with women and then prescribes the ensuing outcome of this as marriage.

It is the comprehensive critical attention of works such as The Woman's Bible and Woman, Church and State that bring descriptions of them as evidence of feminist theologies in their earliest phase. In many ways, the creative radicalism and methodological sophistication that now characterises contemporary feminist theologies is absent, but there is evident a clear anticipation of the key foci and approaches of Christian feminist theologies. Of particular significance in terms of the development of contemporary Christian feminist theological methods and concerns was, first, the insight that characterising this early Christian feminist theological methodology was the recognition of the complicity of Christianity, and especially the Christian Church, in social injustices, and second, the significance of biblical texts and appeals to such texts in sustaining such injustices. Christianity was understood as being part of past and ongoing gender based injustice. The Bible was interpreted as not only prescribing such injustices but was also the basis of authoritative appeals to sustain these injustices. As such, religion, Christianity, the Bible and the Church, were clearly perceived as obstacles, if not actively opposed, to women's liberation or justice concerns.

This first identifiable feminist Christian activity was clearly related to the emergence of the women's movement. Similarly, it was the second wave of feminisms that heralded the emergence of the more recent roots of what have since been identified as feminist theologies. Given the ethos of creativity and radical challenge in North America and Europe in the 1960s it is not surprising that this time is widely taken to mark the emergence of contemporary feminist theologies. And as with earlier developments it is possible to lay down certain textual markers here. One of the most important indicators of the arrival of significant visible feminist presence in theology was an article by Valerie Saiving, 'The human situation: a feminine view" which was published in 1960 in The Journal of Religion.⁶ The significance of this piece is evident in reflections on the text by contemporary feminist writers or critics. It has been described by both Ursula King and Grace Jantzen as a "landmark"⁷ and by Daphne Hampson as "the article which is often taken to mark the beginning of the current wave of feminist theological writing".⁸ In many ways Saiving's article is celebrated as the beginnings of contemporary feminist theological discourse. After the earlier development of critical concern of the 1890s there were of course further publications that addressed issue of religiosity and gender, but such publications were methodologically discernibly different from Saiving's work. It is the style and content of Saiving's article, along with subsequent theological engagement with the kind of issues she raised that proved to be a definitive breakthrough in feminist theological engagement in terms of subsequent f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Contours of Christian Feminist Theologies
• 2 Feminist Rejections of Christianity
• 3 Christology and Passionate Mutuality: The Feminist Theology of Carter Heyward
• 4 Remembering and Valuing: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
• 5 In Context and in Dialogue: Being Indecent With Marcella Althaus-Reid
• 6 Christian Tradition, Authority and Feminisms
• Bibliography
• Index