Women's work: feminist theology for a new generation

TEN YEARS AGO Rebecca Chopp described how women's voices and feminist practices were transforming theological education and the church. Women, she said, were "doing saving work." Doing saving work signified something more than redressing gender injustices or adding women's stories to the church's story. It pointed to the distinctive practices that women were undertaking, practices that offered a fresh reading of Christianity.

At a time in which the diversity of feminist theology defies tidy definitions and agreed-upon agendas, "doing saving work" suggests what's afoot in feminist theology today--namely, bold reinterpretations of Christianity that seek to renew the life of the church and its witness to the world. The saving work of contemporary feminists includes three features in particular.

First, feminist theologians are drawing on women's everyday lives and especially the dynamics of God's grace working in and through them as sources for theological reflection. Appeals to women's experience are hardly new to feminist theology. But unlike earlier waves of feminist theology, in which appeals to women's experience were a wakeup call about women's marginalization, today feminist theologians turn to women's narratives as a source of embodied knowledge. Women's stories serve not only as the testing ground for new theological proposals, but also as material for building new theological traditions that revitalize the entire community of faith.

Second, an increasing number of feminist theologians are directing their energies toward the church's central doctrines and practices--justification by faith, the incarnation, baptism and the Eucharist. They are cutting new paths through these well-worn landscapes, exposing the negative effects of tradition and also its life-giving possibilities. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, many feminist theologians are "taking back" their confessional traditions, refusing to let them go until they wrestle a feminist blessing from them.

Third, many women theologians are using insights and practices from feminist theology in order to address broader social and ethical questions confronting the church, such as globalization, care of the earth, and the shifting patterns of work and family. These feminist projects aim at something more than creating a women's-only discourse. They signal a mainstreaming of feminist discourse so that it might transform the practices of Christian communities and contribute to the flourishing of all of God's creation.

Some examples of the kind of saving work I have in mind are Serene Jones's Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace; Mary Grey's Sacred Longings: The Ecological Spirit and Global Culture; Sarah Coakley's Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender; Elisabeth Johnson's Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints; Stephanie Paulsell's Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice and Deanna Thompson's Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism and the Cross.

By refracting their ecclesial traditions through the prism of feminist theories as well as the fabric of women's lives, all of these theologians offer fresh interpretations of the Christian faith. Some of their interpretations are unsettling. In keeping with earlier generations of feminist theology, these authors pose uncomfortable questions about the church's past and confront it with painful truths about the present. And yet these theologians' ultimate aim is not to deconstruct the Christian faith, but to strengthen its foundations and witness. Thus the most recent wave of Christian feminist proposals is best read as edifying discourse.

We can take Jones's and Greys books as two indications of the kind of sophisticated saving work under way in feminist theology. Jones unabashedly, puts secular feminist theory to "church work," using it to remap the core Reformed doctrines of justification and sanctification, sin and ecclesiology. She uses feminist theory not to deconstruct Reformed faith, but to create a new road map "to help one travel the terrain [of faith] in new ways."

For Jones, doctrines are not a set of rules or propositions that mark the boundaries of orthodoxy. Rather, doctrines are "imaginative scripts" and "life-shaping dramas" that persons of faith "inhabit" and "perform" in unique ways. This does not mean that doctrines are not normative or do not make truth claims, for they surely do. But doctrines also possess a certain fluidity that allows them to stretch across diverse lives and historical contexts and be embodied in culturally specific ways.

Throughout her book, Jones tests how well the central Reformed doctrines work when performed in women's lives. She calls together a community of women witnesses, her local church's Tuesday-night women's group, who try on and try out these Reformed doctrinalscripts and serve as their "contextual judge." Pairing feminist theory with women's local wisdom, Jones exposes not only the potential pitfalls of classical doctrines, but also how, with some skillful feminist remapping, doctrines prove capacious enough for new generations of women to inhabit in grace-filled ways.