Methodological Issues in Feminist/Womanist Theologies - 2

Continuation of Sub-points

3. Feminist/Womanist Re-imagination of Sources

In order to accomplish the task, feminist theologians have to locate the sources and reimagine the sources from feminist/womanist perspective. Different scholars use different sources in  formulating their theology:

            (i) Women’s experience as the source and norm of feminist theology

Zubeno Kithan in her book Women in Church opines that the common starting point of feminist theology is the experience of women of patriarchal oppression. Women have suffered long exploitation and oppression under the social, religious and stereotyping of their life. though there may be numerous factors involved in how one experiences oppression and how one interprets that experience, feminist claim that because traditional Christian theology is the product of male hands, hearts and mind from a male-dominated background, they should look beyond it to see if and how women might draw on their experiences to do theology differently. Ann Dickey Young brings out the different experiences of women- bodily experience, socialised experience, women’s historical experience and women’s individual experience.

A Christian feminist theology tries to articulate adequately the Christian witness of faith from the perspective and experiences of women and oppressed groups. Women’s feminist experience exposes a patriarchal theology, half a theology, and it provides materials for making or re-imagining the sources into a whole theology

            (ii) Christian Tradition as the source and norm

Some feminist like Elizabeth Fiorenza uphold that tradition/scripture does not provide a source or norm of theology, because it contains male biases and cannot be used in any way as a source or norm and that Jesus is not normative in their understanding of tradition/scripture. Fiorenza establishes her own theology in continuity with other liberation theologians. For her, women’s experience of oppression provides not only the basis of feminist theology, but also the experience of this type functions as the central focus and evaluative norm of all liberal theologies.

Fiorenza argues that Jesus is not normative and the community of Jesus was a community of equals. The God of Jesus was an inclusive God who welcomes and receives all people. The women of today can experience a sense of solidarity with the women who gathered around Jesus. True church is the Women-Church of those who gather together to struggle against oppression.

Rosemary Radford Reuther appeals to the sources and norms for theology. Kithan
cites Reuther’s three methodological processes of feminist theology:

            (i) Feminst theology is a critic of androcentrism and misogynism

            (ii) Feminist theology is a quest for alternative tradition

            (iii) And feminist theology is a search for the transformation of models.

Reuther uses as her resources not only Bible and Christian tradition, but also those outside the mainstream Christian tradition. She uses these sources critically with a view that these movements give feminists insights into the contemporary worlds and give some perspectives to the kind of criticisms feminists are levelling at Christian theology.

            (iii) Critique of the traditional view of God: ‘If God is male, then the male is God’; ‘God is not other’

Use of masculine gendered language of God is, broadly, seen as unacceptable as it perpetrates a world view in which the male gender is superior. Christian feminists prefer to use gender neutral terms for God such as ‘Parent’ or ‘Creator’. They wish to remain within the Christian tradition and worship a gender-neutral God. Thinkers such as Naomi Goldenberg argue that the Judeo-Christian God is the architect of patriarchal society - therefore he must be jettisoned. In Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston, 1979) she wrote ‘we women are going to bring an end to God’. And she argued that the feminist alteration of the sacred texts would actually introduce a new religion altogether. Daphne
Hampson argues that feminism is incompatible with Christianity, because the God of the Bible is ‘other’, he existed before creation, he intervenes in the world from ‘outside’ and he can only be known by means of revelation. Hampson argues that feminism offers the religious insight that God is not ‘other’; rather God is that which is connected to everything that is.

            (iv) Towards Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics

Mary Ann Tolbert defines feminist hermeneutics as ‘a reading of the text in the light of oppressive structures of patriarchal society’ and argues that such a reading can be primarily negative or primarily positive. Feminist biblical hermeneutics self-consciously grounds its analyses in the experience of women’s oppression, and moves on to a variety of reading and responses. Feminist biblical interpretation is on part in the larger struggle for women’s liberation. Feminist hermeneutics challenges patriarchal interpretations of the Bible and finds ways for the Bible to be empowering to women.

Rosemary Radford Ruether points out that “The task of feminist hermeneutics today is not only to develop and solidify the principles by which women appropriate the good news of liberation from patriarchy and develop the stories and texts to proclaim this good news. The task of feminist hermeneutics is also to establish this theory of interpretation as normative and indispensable to the understanding of the faith”.

Katherine Doob Sakenfeld in her article entitled “Feminist Uses of Biblical Materials” lists three different approaches to feminist biblical interpretation. The first is to find passages that can be used in opposition to texts that have traditionally been used to oppress women. The second approach is to look at the Bible as a whole “for a theological perspective offering a critique of patriarchy”. Her last approach to feminist biblical interpretation is to look at how women in ancient Israel reacted to the patriarchal society that they lived in, and use them as an example to show modern women how they can work to their fullest potential within
patriarchal society.

4. Feminist/Womanist Re-imaginations of Theological Authority

The feminist paradigm of authority is a shift in interpretive framework that affects all the authority structures in religion and society, including the claim that scripture evokes our consent to faith and action. The prevailing paradigm of authority in Christian and Jewish religion is one of authority as domination. In this framework, all questions of authority are settled with reference to the "hit parade of authority." But, as the feminist-liberation paradigm of authority in community begins to become the one most "seriously imaginable" to women and men of faith, a new framework emerges that allows for multiple authorities to enrich, rather than to outrank, one another.

In this framework, theological "truth" is sought through ordering the hierarchy of doctrines, orders, and degrees. The emerging feminist paradigm trying to make sense of biblical and theological truth claims is that of authority as partnership. In this view, reality is interpreted in the form of a circle of interdependence. Ordering is explored through inclusion of diversity in a rainbow spectrum that does not require that persons submit to the "top" but, rather, that they participate in the common task of creating an interdependent community of humanity and nature. Authority is exercised in community and tends to reinforce ideas of cooperation, with contributions from a wide diversity of persons enriching the whole. When difference is valued and respected, those who have found themselves marginal to church or society begin to discover their own worth as human beings.

Elisabeth Fiorenza has argued that the authority to evoke consent should come from "the experience of women (and all those oppressed) struggling for liberation from patriarchal oppression". She rejects the correlation of a biblical critical principle with a feminist critical principle that is key to both Rosemary Ruether's and Fiorenza understanding of biblical authority. Fiorenza's position is very important, as she calls for a critical perspective that is based in the concrete life experience of women, expressed in the political task of advocacy and liberating praxis . Fiorenza is no longer willing to play the authority game, submitting feminist norms to "higher" biblical authority and androcentric perceptions.( The canon and the rules about authority that come out of a patriarchal mind-set of domination must not decide the basis for feminist interpretation.

Dorothy Lee has argued that a critical feminist liberation theological interpretation remains entrapped in the doubt and skepticism of the Enlightenment. She alleges that it moves from a “hermeneutics of suspicion” to a “reclaiming of the text” rather than starting with “reading a text naively, opening ourselves to its dynamic in the way children listen to stories.” Lee seeks to rehabilitate the mode of “faithful” biblical reading, admonishes feminists to make a contribution to the renewal of the Christian tradition, and warns, “if we begin reading Scripture in a suspicious frame of mind presupposing its androcentrism, our interpretation can become entrapped, at best in a „neutral‟ reading that ignores the place of faith and the Spirit and at worst in negativity, prejudice, self-projection, and the desire for control.” Mary Fulkerson objects that a critical feminist approach is not able to respect the biblical interpretation of conservative wo/men because it rejects biblical texts and readings that advocate kyriarchal values. Also the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire pointed out long ago that the oppressed have internalized their own oppression and are divided within and among themselves: “The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to reject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.” Since both the oppressed and their oppressors are “manifestations of dehumanization,” the methodological starting point of a critical liberation hermeneutics cannot be “common-sense” experience alone, it can be systemically analysed and reflected upon experience.

5. Dalit/Tribal/Adavasi Reconstruction of Feminist Theology

The word “Dalit” means the oppressed or broken victims and refers to the people who are deprived and dehumanised the state of their deprivation/dehumanisation. They are also called as out caste, untouchables in India The term ‘Dalit’ first time was used by Jyoti Rao Phule. Adivasi is a Sanskrit word which literally means original inhabitant (adi-original,vasiinhabitants). It is the word by which the tribal in India are known outside North East
India. It is an umbrella term for a heterogeneous set of ethnic and tribal groups claimed to be the aboriginal population of India.

Dalit theology is new theology because it is from below and uses dalit people’s languages and expressions, their stories and songs of suffering and triumphs popular wisdom including their values, proverbs, folk lore myths and so on to interpret their history and culture, and to articulate a faith to live by and to act on.

The tribal theology, both as a concept and practice, emerged towards the end of the eighties in response to different forms of barbaric atrocities, human rights violation, ethnic conflict, poverty, injustice, ecological destruction and Hindu philosophical tradition of Indian Christian Theology. It is an attempt to express Christian faith in socio-cultural, traditional and liturgical and thought patterns of the people. The experience of oppression and hardship, stories, myth, symbols, dances, songs, and the tribal people’s spirituality become vital source for doing theology.

Women are suppressed everywhere, whether they are Dalits, Tribals or Adivasi. The theologies which are made for them are not will suited for them. The only method how they can fit in it is by reconstructing the feminist theology in their experiences.

Reconstruction of Feminist Theology from Dalit/Adivasi/Tribal

Seeing through the eyes of Dalit/Adivasi/Tribal women, Mark 12:43 describes three significant things:

First, the narrator describes that ‘Jesus called his disciples and said to them’. Here Jesus’ ‘calling’ is intended to teach the disciples some new lessons. While Jesus was sitting and observing people’s activity of putting offerings into the treasury, the disciples distance themselves from Jesus and from the scene. They would have been engaged in their own business. Second, the woman gets all the ‘praising’ from Jesus as he reckons her activity with significance. Third, Jesus is ‘contrasting’ her activity with that of the activity of her male counterparts. The lessons we learn from here are: first, Jesus measures not as the world measures; second, he honors the dishonored poor-widow-woman whereas the honored richmen dishonored; and third, the disciples learned a significant lesson from the life of the poor woman. By using the Biblical reinterpretation from Dalit/Tribal/Adivasi women, it will uplift them and they can well attach to the Bible.

Praveen S. Perumalla argues Dalit feminist theology vision for transformed social relationships through their struggles and mutual interactions between the subalterns: challenges to build solidarity among contextual liberation theologies. Hrangthan Chhungi emphasizes Interfacing tribal and adivasi theology with feminist theology for building theologies of solidarity. Re-visiting the Communitarian aspect of land in building a relevant tribal theology. Lalrinawmi Ralte  re-define and re-imagine a theological discourse from Mizo wisdom tradition: feminist proactive roles to healing, blessing and advice. Asangla Lemtur argues that re-imagination of feminist theology from tribal perspective must be towards a new horizon of developing tribal feminist faith articulation.

Re-visioning the role of empowered women, Dalits, adivasi and tribals in the missions of the church and articulate a theology from the lens of feminist perspective and also engaging in a theological discourse from their experience, subjugation and marginalized situations will bring new horizons and paradigms.