Transformative Lutheran Theologies

Feminist, Womanist, And Mujerista Perspectives

Mary J. Streufert

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800663773
• eBook ISBN: 9781451414493
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The first of its kind, this book is a systematic representation of Lutheran feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies: systematic, in that it addresses classical loci of systematic theology; contemporary, in that it is resoundingly constructive and relevant for the contemporary church; and feminist, in that the contributors write from a feminist perspective although they reflect a variety of positions within feminist discourse.

PART 1

Legacies and Margins

PART 1 SITUATES LUTHERAN women’s work in theology. In the first chapter, L. DeAne Lagerquist’s historical narrative relates some of the memories of Lutheran women in the United States, unfolding a portrait of multiple, contextual, and often marginal theological and social locations in the Lutheran tradition. Caryn Riswold closes the chapter with a theological reflection that highlights the characteristically Lutheran and feminist theological themes that embolden and equip the Lutheran theological enterprise. In the second chapter, Mary (Joy) Philips explores the theological meaning of margins. Her methodological proposal identifies marginal social locations that produce a certain type of hybridity and access to particular memories. These locations and memories open up Christian understandings of identity and make demands on the church—and its theology—to be marginal.

Chapter 1

Historical and Theological Legacies of Feminism and Lutheranism

L. DeAne Lagerquist and Caryn D. Riswold

“For to remain a member of a historic Church is not to achieve finality. A creed is not an imprisoning wall; it is a gate, opening on a limitless country that cannot be entered in any other way.”

—Vida Dutton Scudder, On Journey¹

“I AM A STUDENT of theology. I am also a woman.”² When feminist theologian Valerie Saiving (1921–1992) made these declarations in 1960 they pointed to the rarity of one person claiming both identities. Her essay “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” signaled the beginnings of theological engagement in the second wave of feminism in the United States. Since then an increasing number of women here and around the world has taken up the study of theology. Feminist theology is now a recognized field with its own distinctive themes, classic texts, and characteristic questions. Feminist theologians, like feminists more generally, recognize their commonalties as women and insist that women’s experiences must be taken into account. They also recognize the profound reality that all women are not the same. Significant differences grounded in factors such as race, sexuality, class, nationality, or confession, as well as in the particularities of individual life experience, contribute to womanist, mujerista, queer, and other theological conversations.

The theologians in this book were young or not yet born in 1960. They join Vida Dutton Scudder (1861–1954), Valerie Saiving, Martin Luther, and a host of witnesses in exploring the country entered through the gospel gate. Their work enriches the traditions they draw upon and encourages expressions of Christian teaching that are Lutheran and feminist. It explores affinities and tensions between feminism and Lutheran theology as well as the ambivalence and generativity produced by the two together. Moreover, these women bring their varied talents and education, relationships and life experiences to the task of articulating the life-giving message of God’s love for their own communities and in their own time and place. They add their voices to a song as rich, dynamic, and resonant as the harmonies of the traditional spiritual “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep” performed a cappella.

Echoing Saiving, the authors declare, “We are Lutherans; we are women; we are theologians.” Simultaneously claiming multiple identities, they display a characteristically Lutheran insistence that one can be two (or more) things at once and suggest that their theology and their identities are intricately interwoven. Lutheran theology is thick with both/ands: the Christian is at the same time justified and still a sinner; God governs through both spiritual and temporal means; at the Lord’s table we receive Jesus’ body and blood truly present in bread and wine that remain bread and wine; a Christian’s freedom in God’s grace is as absolute as her obligation to her neighbor. The two-ness of being Lutheran and feminist (and other things as well) is more akin to living simultaneously in liturgical and academic time than it is to binary, contesting opposites. These authors also participate in the venerable Lutheran practice of publicly stating and defending one’s belief. Such confession is the interpretive activity whereby divine love is spoken into new circumstances.

I am both a historian and a participant in these discussions and developments. I am a feminist because I am a Lutheran Christian; the way I am a Lutheran is shaped by my being baptized but not ordained, feminist, American, a monolingual native speaker of English, of pan-Scandinavian descent several generations removed from “the boat.” My feminist and Lutheran identities are those of a woman of a particular age. I was five when Valarie Saiving wrote her landmark essay; the year I graduated from college about fifty American Lutheran pastors were women. My development as a historian of American Lutheranism coincided with the emergence of feminist theology. As I recount recent decades, my recollection of specific people and events is informed by my own experiences. What follows is more a first, personal effort to reflect on what has transpired than an exhaustive, authoritative account—yet it is one that serves the purpose of tracing some of the work of Lutheran women, on whose labor contemporary Lutheran feminist theology builds.

Luther and the Lutheran Heritage

Neither Martin Luther nor the movement he launched can be unambiguously described as feminist, still there are hints of affinities with contemporary feminist concerns. God’s gracious love, the heart of Luther’s theology, makes no distinction between women and men who are equal in their brokenness. Divine grace is poured out without regard for any human distinctions, accomplishments, or shortcomings. Everyone comes before God as a beggar needing to be made whole and is fed forgiveness in, with, and under the bread-body and blood-wine. Luther recognized that all stations in life offer honorable work that pleases God and benefits the neighbor—the milkmaid as much as the farmer, the mother as much as the priest, the wife as much as the magistrate. The schools he established enrolled both girls and boys so that all could read the Bible and Catechism. His affection for Katherine von Bora and their children was enthusiastic; their household modeled the Christian home as a school for faith. Nonetheless, the benefits of granting spiritual value to women’s domestic responsibilities and providing basic religious education must in retrospect be weighed against the loss of monastic access to theological study and religious leadership for a smaller number of women. A very small number of women with high social position were patronesses of the Reformation, and wives of pastors had opportunity for a new sort of ministry, but the orders of creation restricted women’s arenas of activity. The mixed resources Luther’s theology and reforms offer to feminist historians and theologians require discerning appropriation lest the dangers overwhelm the gifts.³

Lutheran women’s access to advanced theological study and public church offices were often restricted in subsequent generations. After authoritative statements of doctrine were gathered into the Book of Concord (1580), orthodox theologians labored to systematize the Reformers’ insights. Using philosophical tools and concerned to secure the objective claims of theology, they highlighted the specialized nature of theology as an enterprise generally closed to lay people and consequently to women. Because evangelical Pietism strove to restore personal experience of the gospel to a central place and granted spiritual significance to the home, women’s activities, particularly as mothers, were given greater value. Without rejecting infant baptism, Pietists encouraged personal awakening, whereby the believer became aware of her sinfulness, received assurance of God’s love, and determined to live in a manner worthy of that love. Lay preachers—men and women—were granted authority on the basis of spiritual gifts rather than educational credentials or official positions. Women were authors and readers of devotional literature, including hymns such as Lena Sandell’s (1832–1903) still beloved “Children of the Heavenly Father.” Pietists established charitable institutions such as hospitals and orphanages where women engaged in works of love.

Lutherans in the United States

The entire range of European Lutheranism was carried to North America by several waves of Scandinavian and German immigrants, beginning in the colonial era. Without the support and constraints of state sponsorship, Lutherans in the United States formed churches distinguished from each other by religious and cultural characteristics. Well into the twentieth century, the combination of the high value placed on polity, styles of piety, and confessional matters by many Lutherans and the stress some maintained on ethnic ties and use of non-English languages served to insulate Lutherans from other American Christians. Even Lutherans’ internal debates about how much and how best to adapt to their shared American context contributed to isolation and inhibited outreach and discouraged productive interaction across denominational lines. From the late 1800s into the 1980s several rounds of institutional mergers consumed enormous resources and focused the attention of theologians (most often male clergy) on confessional issues that had little resonance with feminist concerns. Likewise, Lutherans’ pioneering involvement in bilateral ecumenical dialogues was more likely to cast feminism and women’s full participation in the church as a problem than as an opportunity for new insight. By 1988 two bodies—the newly formed, composite Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, rooted in mid-nineteenth-century German immigration—encompassed nearly all Lutherans in their membership. That the ELCA ordained women and had over one thousand women on its clergy roster was among the significant differences between the churches.

American Lutheran Women before 1970

Once in the United States, Lutherans continued to limit most women’s religious roles to the home and congregation, some to the present day. Catechetical instruction prepared girls with a minimal level of theological knowledge. Family devotional practices gave mothers an educational role that could extend to teaching children in congregational settings.⁴ By the late nineteenth century, women’s organizations provided members with Bible study materials, opportunities for leadership, and connections to the larger Lutheran church and its missions around the world.⁵ Early on, some men objected to these groups as subversive and giving too much autonomy to women who were prohibited from ordination and usually from holding office or even voting in congregations. The structure and purposes of Lutheran women’s organizations paralleled those in other Protestant churches, but the groups were a bridge to ecumenical cooperation for only a few leaders. Emmy Evald (1857–1946), longtime president of the Augustana Synod’s national women’s organization, was active in woman’s rights activities including the Woman’s Suffrage Association in Chicago; however, she stands as an exceptional rather than a typical case.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century Lutherans established colleges for the education of both young men and women. These institutions of higher learning offered students freedom mingled with constraints. Programs promoted conventional notions of woman’s nature and women’s roles. Young women were directed toward teaching or nursing or returning home as better-educated potential wives and mothers. But at these Lutheran colleges young women could also catch a glimpse of possibilities for careers in public arenas. The histories of these colleges includes exemplary, inspiring teachers such as Rosa Young (1874–1970) at Concordia College Selma, a Missouri Synod school for African Americans, who encouraged both women and men to follow their calling into church and society.

Barred from ordination and seminary training, Lutheran women found other ways to answer their vocations. Some became deaconesses, some taught subjects such as English, history, or music at Lutheran colleges, and some were lay professionals in the local and national church. On the forefront of the churches’ confession through works of love, deaconesses also reflected upon the religious basis of their ministry and its theological significance. Sister Ingeborg Sponland (1870–1951), director of Deaconess Hospital in Chicago, observed:

To us as deaconesses truth cries out that all human beings have a soul which has been bought by the blood of Jesus Christ for the Kingdom of heaven. There can be no discrimination as to nationality or creed when it comes to serving our Master. He served all humanity and bids us to follow in his footsteps. In modifying our methods so as to be able to serve people of various nationalities and creeds we gain a broader vision and a deeper sympathy and understanding—a compassion and love for souls that are without Christ.⁶

This expansive view of the church’s responsibilities in the world was a challenge to these churches’ narrow focus upon their own members and to an emphasis on right belief without action. Sister Elizabeth Fedde’s (1850–1921) comment that the deaconesses were themselves the Bible their patients read, calls such a distinction into question, particularly if word and sacrament are elevated above or separated from works of love.

Lutheran women in the twentieth century also were particularly active in campus ministry and social service. No doubt many women found their work personally rewarding and religiously significant. Nonetheless, the church was not always prepared to receive their gifts. Mary Markley (1891–1954), executive for student work in the United Lutheran Church (ULC), described the difficulty in 1939:

I grant you that the church-related colleges may be in a dilemma. They are educating not females, ladies, or women, but personalities. They are sending these personalities—Christian women with initiative and a sense of responsibility—back into churches in which outmoded practical methods persist from the individual congregation all along the line to national boards and church bodies.⁷

Her colleague Mildred Winston’s (1900–1980) experience illustrates the situation. Following graduation from Susquehanna College in the 1920s she pursued advanced study at Biblical Seminary in New York. When no Lutheran college was willing to employ her, she joined Markley as a lay professional with the ULC. For three decades Winston encouraged young women to answer callings within the church; in the 1950s she organized programs that provided young women with practical work experience, theological training, and opportunities to meet professional women in a range of occupations. Cordelia Cox (1901–1997), for example, brought her training and experience as a social worker and college instructor to her work as the first director of Lutheran Refugee Services, where she oversaw the resettlement of 57,000 displaced persons and refugees. Women such as these produced workshops, newsletters, and reports rather than volumes of systematic theology; they were reflective about their work directing the church’s ministry in the world and deeply engaged in what today we call practical theo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Legacies and Margins
• Part 2: God and Humanity
• Part 3: Sin and Grace
• Part 4: The Work and Person of Christ
• Part 5: Spirit and Body
• Part 6: Knowing and Living
• Part 7: Hope and the Future
• Notes
• Index