Empowering Memory and Movement

Thinking and Working across Borders

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451481815
• eBook ISBN: 9781451452310
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

With Empowering Memory and Movement, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza completes a three-volume look across her influential work and career. In Transforming Vision (2011), she drew from decades of pioneering scholarship to offer the contours of a critical feminist hermeneutic. The chapters in Changing Horizons (2013) sketched out a theory of liberation. Now, the consequences for a liberating praxis are elaborated in interviews and essays that chart Schüssler Fiorenza's own personal and professional history as these are intertwined with the history of the worldwide movement for emancipation and full equality. Empowering Memory and Movement looks back, but also looks around at challenges and potentialities on the global scene, and looks ahead to an emancipatory future, with a critical and wise engagement with scripture and the interpretive tradition always at the center.

4

Scripture as Site of Memory, Struggle, and Vision

26

Critical Reflections on Philosophy and The*logy

An Interview with Michael Norton

This interview ^[1] introduces the concluding, fourth part of the book, which explores Scripture as a site of memory, struggle, and vision. It spells out again my understanding of Scripture as a site of memory where struggles take place and empowering visions are articulated. Engaging in such struggles and visions for changing kyriarchal structures and inspiring justice may recover the power of Scripture as the word of G*d. Hence, it is especially important that our discourses about G*d do not continue the rhetorical situation of exclusion in which the tradition of the the*logical and philosophical disciplines places us. In order to recover Scripture as a site of memory, struggle, and vision, we must constantly question the kyriocentric academic and ecclesiastical discourses that, consciously or not, exclude a vast majority of people as philosophical and the*logical subjects.

Michael Norton (MN): The conference in which you are here to participate—Religion & Postmodernism 4: Transcendence and Beyond—is for the most part a philosophical one. So, simply put, why are you here?

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ESF): I accepted the invitation because this conference engenders a very important discussion on a very significant topic. I am here because I am concerned that we critically reflect on how such scientific discourses—philosophical and theological discourses—have been constructed traditionally on the basis of the positive exclusion of women and all people who were subjugated or subordinated, who were not counted as full citizens or as fully human throughout most of Western history. This is the problem I am always concerned with when I accept invitations to conferences where the discourse is set in a disciplinary way. It is especially important when the discourse is about God. The challenge is to get people to think about this rhetorical situation of exclusion in which the tradition of the the*logical and philosophical disciplines places us. I am always hoping that participants will question the set academic discourse that consciously or not excludes a vast majority of people as philosophical and the*logical subjects. I need to bring up this question again and again in order to insist on the responsibility connected to engaging in disciplinary discourses such as this one.

MN: How would you say philosophy and religious discourse influence each other?

ESF: As disciplinary discourses both philosophical and theological or religious studies discourses share a lot in common: they have been articulated by an elite group of educated (clergy)men and have fulfilled ideological functions of exclusion and kyriarchal legitimation of domination. Philosophical discourses may be more strongly oriented toward society at large, and theological discourses more strongly to the churches or religious communities, but they both have often been discourses of domination. For instance, if one looks at democracy and political philosophy in antiquity, one will see that the classical political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle have ideologically rationalized the exclusion of the Others. The same is true for Aquinas and the whole theological history. You find theologians as well as philosophers formulating arguments as to why certain people cannot participate fully in a democratic society or in church and religion. A critical feminist analysis as I have developed documents that theology and philosophy have a lot in common because of their common history of ideological legitimization and exclusion. Hence, they both have also a lot of work to do to rectify this common heritage.

MN: So, do you see the domains of philosophy and theology—respectively, as you said, society-at-large and religious communities—as being two separate arenas, or are they in some way intertwined? Is one a subset of the other?

ESF: If one looks at them as scholarly disciplines, then historically speaking, philosophy has been a subset of theology. With the secularization of the university in modernity, this relationship has changed drastically and has become almost the reverse since in modernity philosophy took over many of the functions that theology had in the pre-modern age. I suggest that in each case this relationship between philosophy and theology needs to be looked at critically, since it has been construed in terms of subordination. In antiquity, philosophy and theology were not as much separated. I think it is a traditional Christian and modern disciplinary emphasis that separates and dichotomizes their relationship.

MN: In the postmodern situation, is there going to be yet another change?

ESF: What I realized again at this conference is how strongly Western philosophy is shaped by Christian religious and theological articulations. This is true if one looks back at Hegel or Kant and other great philosophical masters. However, I also realized at this meeting that some aspects and certain castings of the philosophical discourse are not as critical as a critical feminist discourse of liberation is. In such a critical feminist the*logical context, certain procedures would not be acceptable anymore. For instance, certain philosophical lectures quoted out of context a Scripture passage here, or a Scripture passage there, in order to bolster their argument. This would no longer be tolerable in a critical the*logical discourse but seems still to be acceptable, or again to be acceptable, in some postmodern philosophical discourses. Moreover, it was quite an experience for me to realize that philosophical discourse—at least at this conference—seems still to be very heavily Christian. Such an emphasis would, for instance, not go unchallenged in critical feminist discussions in religion because in such critical feminist discussions one would have to spell out clearly in what kind of discursive framework one operates. Some lectures seem to have taken for granted that we have still a predominantly Christian culture where we can articulate problems within a Christian framework and linguistic universe.

MN: Would you say that Scripture, as revelation, cannot tell us anything purely affirmative about God or divine reality?

ESF: This is a Christian theological question that needs to be unpacked. What do you mean by Scripture as revelation, what by “purely” affirmative? It is also a philosophical question: Do you think that human language can adequately express divine reality, be it purely negative or purely affirmative? Modern biblical studies have raised these questions for three hundred years or more, but, as I have already pointed out, it seems that postmodern philosophical and theological discourses again fall behind such critical insights. Whatever ideological-critical knowledge critical biblical scholarship has already achieved is now being taken back, in some postmodern reflections, to a pre-critical stage when dealing with Scripture, a move that then allows one to recover a kind of Christian dogmatic understanding of revelation that goes back to the book of Revelation. Such an uncritical understanding of revelation, however, is not only a step backwards with respect to modern biblical criticism insofar as it does not allow for the ideological-critical task, but it also falls back behind pre-modernity insofar as it does not recognize the traditional notion of multiple senses of Scripture and multiple ways of interpretation. At the same time, it remains within the positivist scientific horizon of modernity insofar as it understands texts as windows to the world, accurately reflecting divine reality, or sees texts as factual transcripts of divine revelation and claims to be able to identify their single true meaning. From a critical feminist perspective, such an understanding is very questionable.

Because of the work of critical biblical scholarship, we have learned that the Bible is written in culturally and historically conditioned human language that is not only pluri-vocal but also grammatically androcentric—that means male-centered language—which functions as generic language. Feminists have pointed to the androcentric character of biblical languages and African Americans, Latina/o/s and scholars from non-Western cultures have even further complicated this critical insight by elaborating that androcentric biblical languages and translations are white Western and Eurocentric. Feminists and scholars from non-androcentric cultural language contexts have pointed out that androcentric language has an enormous influence over how we speak about G*d and how we understand revelation and the divine. Big debates have ensued with conservative theologians who insist that G*d is “He,” male, all-powerful king etc.

To come back to your question, if they are right—and they certainly have the text on their side—that G*d is male, Lord, King and Father because it is revealed in Scripture, then only elite males but not wo/men and non-elite men are made in the image of G*d. If you insist on such an understanding of revelation, then you also must claim that it is divinely ordained that the majority of people are excluded from representing the divine or that revelation is against democracy because Scripture teaches that God is king and the earth is under his kingly rule. This belief has for centuries engendered the theological legitimizations of exclusion and domination. So that is why a postmodern step behind critical biblical studies and into piety is very worrisome to me.

MN: Is there room somewhere for an experience of the divine that can step outside these androcentric, kyriocentric structures?

ESF: What I tried to suggest in my paper is that the divine can be experienced today not by stepping outside kyriarchal structures—we can’t do this because we are deeply implicated in them—but by trying to change them. The divine can be glimpsed in the struggles for justice and transformation, struggles that are also reflected in Scripture understood as the prototype of Christian life and community. So wherever people are engaged in these struggles, there the divine presence, the Shekinah, can be glimpsed. This view is somewhat similar to what Richard Kearney tried to say today using Etty Hillesum as an example. But then he seemed not to quite follow through with it. I also would not want to appeal only to altruism, so that it is always the faceless poor who are objects of our search for the divine. Rather, it is in the struggle of everyone for integrity, for justice, for food and survival, for changing structures of domination, for transformation; it is in such everyday struggles that we can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Crossing Borders
• Memory and Movement
• Memory and Theory
• Scripture as Site of Memory, Struggle, and Vision