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This survey explores the emergence of feminist theology, highlighting its global nature and common themes of critique and reconstruction. Christian women theologians address sexist symbols in Christianity and envision a more just world drawing on cultural resources beyond Christianity. It also examines how the addition of feminine themes in theology enforces the dominant gender paradigm. The text references works by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Daphne Hampson, Sarah Chisholm, and Sally McFague.
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This very brief survey of the emergence of feminist theology, particularly in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, has made it evident that feminist theology is global. Christian women theologians across the globe are concerned with common themes of critique of sexist symbols in Christianity and the reconstruction of the symbolism for God, Christ, humanity and nature, sin, and salvation, to affirm women’s full and equivalent humanity. But women theologians in each context take up issues particular to their societies and histories and draw on cultural resources before and beyond Christianity to envision a more just and loving world. Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘The Emergence of Christian Feminist Theology’ Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology.
“What has been called ‘feminine’ in Western thought has been constructed to complement the construction of masculinity. Thus, the adding of feminine to masculine themes in theology mostly enforces the dominant gender paradigm.” Women’s Experience – “a basic source of content as well as a criterion for truth.” RRR. Sexism and God Talk
Daphne Hampson “I am a Western person, living in a post-Christian age, who has taken something with me from Christian thinkers, but who has rejected the Christian myth. Indeed I want to go a lot further than that. The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection, calculated to legitimise a patriarchal world and to enable men to find their way within it. We need to see it for what it is.”
“Of my two ‘handicaps’ being a woman put far more obstacles in my way than being black.” Sarah Chisholm, a member of the civil rights movement,
Sally McFague“If the imagery of mothers, lovers, friends, and bodies proved credible for picturing the God-world relation, it would certainly also be attractive, for it is unmatched in power: it holds within it the power not of mere kings but of life and death.”
‘In what sense feminist theology is a biblical hermeneutics will be the central focus of the piece.’ The Editor’s notes for contributors to this volume of essays provided this coup de grace ˆ of a final sentence. To get the words ‘feminist’, ‘theology’, ‘biblical’, and ‘hermeneutics’ into one sentence raises a breath-taking number of problems of definition and appropriation for writer and reader alike.
